Poetics and Music: Hopkins and Nietzsche

Abstract

A FEW WORDS are perhaps necessary at the outset to justify the seemingly eccentric linking of the two figures named in the subtitle of this paper. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Gerard Manley Hopkins were nearly exact contemporaries: both were born in 1844; Hopkins died in June 1889, some five months after Nietzsche went insane in Turin. Mere contemporaneity, of course, is hardly a sufficient guide either to the problem of direct influence-judging from the present state of the scholarly record, neither knew the work of the other-or to more general questions of intellectual or philosophical affinity. The parallels between Hopkins and Nietzsche, once they have been noticed, however, are striking and significant. Each was touched directly by the tenets of received religion: Hopkins converted to Catholicism during his undergraduate years at Oxford; Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor. Nietzsche's training for and brief career in classical philology parallels Hopkins's lifelong philological interests and studies. Moreover, Hopkins's rank amateurism in the field is perhaps not, as one might think, a sign of his distance from Nietzsche, the professor, but rather, given the opinion of Nietzsche's early work among professional colleagues like Wilamowitz, constitutes another mark of their similarity. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Nietzsche was quite as unprofessional a philologist as Hopkins. During their comparatively short respective careers as university lecturers, each gave courses on rhetoric from which notes have survived to provide scholars with rich material for understanding the less fragmentary of their productions. Both were interested in music, particularly in the relationship of music to literature, although neither was an accomplished professional musician. The point of the main title of this paper, which will emerge more fully in the course of the argument, alludes to this funda-