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242 A Preferable Nudity Goya’s Majas, for example. . . . The one in clothes would likely be ashamed unclothed. The one that’s nude would be defiled clothed. This proves the naked and the nude are not the same. A poem fraught with artifice before it’s shorn of everything superfluous invites denuding from the start. What’s left at last might not be poetry at all. A poem in the nude affirms its nudity without disguise. It’s absolute in all its spareness down to what defies addition or subtraction or indifference. The Maja in her finery and shoes presents a woman hidden by the muting camouflage of fashion. The Maja nude reveals a woman’s total face in perpetuity unhidden and aloud from eyebrows down to toes. Adornment would insult it. ...

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