heart's blood spilt Out of heart's anguish, high heart, all-hoping heart, Child-innocent, clean heart, of guile or guilt, But storm-tried, fire-purged, heaven chastened --Monk Gibbon, Poetry of Gerard Manley (1) I Exchanging letters in 1879, Hopkins and his friend R. W. Dixon took issue with Tennyson's poems for their lack of Dixon complained about the versification of Hall: the effect of being artificial & light: most unfit for passion, of which indeed there nothing in it, but only a man making an unpleasant & rather ungentlemanly (2) Hopkins agreed: not only Locksley but Maud an ungentlemanly row and Aylmer's Field an ungentlemanly row and the Princess an ungentlemanly row. To be sure this gives him vogue, popularity, but not that sort of ascendancy Goethe or even Burns, scoundrel as the first was, not to say the second; but then they spoke out the rakishness of their hearts and everybody recognised the really beating, though rascal, vein. (Correspondence, 1: 347) The fervour of Hopkins's response might feel surprising, but Dixon has touched a chord which reverberates to the very core of Hopkins's art. Hopkins's comments remember Hazlitt's judgment that Burns had a of flesh and blood beating in his bosom: of all Victorian poets, Hopkins most resoundingly bears out Hazlitt's assertion that a great poet, we mean one who gives ... the utmost force to the passions of the heart. (3) There no more vital image in poetry than the heart--and, one might say, none more susceptible to cliche. essence of all said John Keble in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1844), is to be found, not in of thought, nor in pointed cleverness of phrase, but in the depths of the and the most sacred feelings of the men who write. (4) If Victorian tastes not quite arrived at T. S. Eliot's visceral disdain for Sidney's injunction to into thy heart, and write (that not looking deep enough ... One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts), (5) nineteenth-century writers were nonetheless alert to the dangers of speaking vaguely and diffusely of the heart, as John Beer puts it in his account of the heart's importance to Wordsworth, and were increasingly responsive to its physiological as well as symbolic existence. (6) The organ's varied medical, poetic, and religious significance for the poets of the middle of the century has been fleshed out by Kirstie Blair in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, and much of what I have to say extends her discussion of Victorian poetry's intense and oddly pathological concentration on the to Hopkins. (7) Hopkins's poems return again and again to the heart: in doing so they activate a range of overlapping significances which will lend shape to what follows. The was a focus for Hopkins's thinking about poetic rhythm and inspiration; it assumed devotional significance in the form of the Catholic symbol of the Sacred Heart; in some of his most affecting poems it serves as an object of interrogation and companionship as well as a source of expression. Yet if Hopkins's concern with the shares in what Jason R. Rudy calls the astonishing physicality of Victorian poetry, the special intensity of that concern was crucial to Hopkins's independence from his contemporaries, too. (8) Hopkins's poetry brings high-wrought subtlety to bear upon its expression of the heart's depths. It stands apart for its ability to endow this most universal of images with individual character--to speak, as he felt Tennyson's didn't, from a real human II The heart, for Hopkins, was the seat of character, and it was the job of style to make that character manifest. His and Dixon's objections to the lack of heart in Hall are common enough, but they illuminate a matter crucial to Hopkins's differences with his contemporaries. …