To understand Hugh Hood's work it is necessary to understand his Catholicism, not only as it pertains to his views of morality, but also as it affects his system of aesthetics, as this results in an art which offers a complete, coherent and systematic way of looking at the universe. This aesthetic system is made clear in Hood's essays "The Ontology of Super-Realism," and "The Absolute Infant." In these, he explores the idea that the perceptive agent of immaterial reality is the imagination, a position further developed in his short story "The Village Inside." Through its utilization of contemporary landscape as relic, this story opens the past to the present and demonstrates Hood's understanding of the coherence of the universe through exposing the coherence of time.
