The Hopkins Path to Postmodern Poetry

Abstract

This paper asserts that the poetics of New England poet Denise Levertov may be seen as a bridge from Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetics to postmodern poetics of today. Using the imagism and the ideas of Richard Rorty, William Pratt, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Charles Bernstein, and Bob Perelman, the writer outlines how the key concepts of imagism were adopted from Gerard Manley Hopkins and in new guises used by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Denise Levertov and postmodern poets such as Sheila Murphy and Arthur Vogelsang. The writer also contends that what governs the changes in the Victorian poet's desperate poetics is attitude: Modernist poetry is one of mourning, and postmodernist poetry is one of joy in the absurd.