Together, the two essays "Sober Colouring: The Ontology of Super-Realism" and "Before the Flood" present a view of art that has shaped all of Hugh Hood's writing in varying degrees. In the two essays, Hood conveys his admiration for an art that exhibits the transcendental element dwelling in living things, for an art that is neither penned in itself as an image is ... nor ... hissing away into the invisible inane as symbols do, but emblematic, that is, as colourful as an image, and as full of meta-meaning as a symbol, indeed fuller because the implications of the symbol are so chillingly, so frustratingly imprecise. Quite early in his career, however, before the writing of these two essays, this theory was given a subtle, coherent, and comprehensive form of expression through the composition of Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life.
