Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

Gerard Manley Hopkins Adrian Grafe (bio) Highly specialized, intricate scholarly approaches to the poet combined in 2019 with more popular, mixed-media ones. The weekly BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time (“Gerard Manley Hopkins,” March 21, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003clk) brought together three academic specialists of the poet—Martin Dubois, Catherine Phillips, and Jane Wright—to discuss Hopkins’s life, poetry, and legacy, as well as the social and literary environments in which he lived and wrote. This was rather a tall order for a forty-minute radio program on a poet whom the presenter, Melvyn Bragg, citing Leavis, called “the greatest Victorian poet.” Bragg’s questions were thoroughly researched and yet were the kind that the listener who was not a specialist of the poet, or even of poetry, but who was curious, would have liked to ask. The program thus stressed Hopkins’s difference: difference from the rest of his family and from most of his Oxford tutors and friends—future poet laureate Robert Bridges, for one—in his decision to convert to Roman Catholicism; difference from other post-Romantic Victorian poets in the high degree of experimentalism he brought to his art; and difference from his working-class parishioners in Glasgow and Liverpool in particular, due to his upper-middle-class English background. By alluding to the “danger” that [End Page 350] adhered to Catholicism during Hopkins’s time at Oxford, Bragg, discerningly if perhaps inadvertently, put his finger on one of the great attractions of the Catholic faith for Hopkins, who was instinctively a contrarian and risk-taker. Bragg termed Hopkins a writer of “nature poetry.” Hopkins may, in fact, be deemed to have adopted the Scotist view of the univocity of nature and supernature. From this point of view, nature is certainly worthy of celebration in and for itself. But nature for Hopkins is a site—perhaps for him the supreme site—in which God reveals Himself to the poet: “he is under the world’s splendour and wonder” so “I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand” (from stanza 5 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. N. H. MacKenzie [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], p. 120; this volume is hereafter abbreviated to PW). Hopkins’s post-Romantic worldview inherited the Romantics’ view of nature while Christianising it. The argument propounded by certain critics, Seamus Heaney1 among them, that some of Hopkins’s sonnets are made up of an octave of natural description followed somewhat artificially by a sestet of Christian doctrine (as though to do penance, as it were, for the octave) needs to be adjusted in the light of the imagery of poems which appear to conform to this view, but which, in reality, contain imagery in the octave that can be said to express a religious perspective. But it is also true that Hopkins’s faith and austere religious life gave him the freedom or “license”—one of his favorite words, as was pointed out in the program—to revel in the beauties of the natural world. Jane Wright caught something of the specificity of Hopkins’s poetry when she referred to his “spotty language” as it appears in “Pied Beauty,” or described “sprung rhythm” as “boingy” [sic]. Catherine Phillips stressed the fact that Hopkins took a keen interest in the literary production of his time, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, writing a poem in answer to one of Christina Rossetti’s (cf. below) and corresponding with his friend Canon Richard Dixon who was himself associated with the Brotherhood (as was another friend and correspondent of Hopkins’s, Coventry Patmore). In this respect, Heather McAlpine, in her clear and thoughtful study, Emblematic Strategies in Pre-Raphaelite Literature (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2019), makes a case for Hopkins as “a participant in the Pre-Raphaelite movement,” while a sentence further on in the same paragraph begins, “For Hopkins, as for other Pre-Raphaelites” (p. 147). One may be tempted to feel these phrases—explicitly including Hopkins within the Pre-Raphaelite “movement,” though not the Brotherhood—slightly overstate (Christina Rossetti referred to the movement as “our ‘school...