Abstract

This essay has two basic purposes: Historically it tries to elaborate what is deeply modernist and constructivist in a poet typically considered a brilliant and idiosyncratic figure whose work is sui generis. In order to accomplish that, the essay proposes a possibly original reading of basic general concerns of Modernism as aligning the entire movement with Hegel’s concept of “inner sensuousness” as the core of Romantic art, for Hegel, its most developed form. Analytically, the essay proposes that Hegel’s intellectual framework, along with Moore’s poetry, can be still central to the culture wars because they afford a philosophical framework from which we can see the continuing importance of Modernist art to struggles against materialist accounts of mental life and the values of aesthetic contemplation.