transformed English poetry. Today, more than a century and a quarter after his death, he is universally recognized among the greatest English poets. And his greatest greatness, I think, lies in his appropriation of nature to establish religious meaning. Nature, as he idiosyncratically saw it, fastened him to God. He “instressed” an “inscape” (pattern), and this act energized him and whatever he looked upon. And though he would spend the final five years of his life plagued by “fits of sadness so severe they resemble madness,” Hopkins never abandoned the solution he had achieved through his reading of nature’s explosive titration with God.
The mid-Victorian period, with its legacy of Romantic poetry and painting, produced many amateur naturalists. Observers repeatedly described Hopkins as stooping down to study wet sand or blades of grass or little blue flowers. When he was eighteen, he drew an excellent likeness of weeds which he labeled neatly, “Dandelion, Hemlock & Ivy.” It was not unusual for nineteenth-century poets to associate nature with heightened emotional states, or even to bind it to the notion that God himself may have written nature like a book. This book could reveal the divine to those who had eyes to read. Keats had coined the phrase “egotistical sublime” to describe Wordsworth’s enhanced self-consciousness in the presence of nature. Hopkins, on the other hand, instressed the sublime to enhance his other-consciousness.
Hopkins grew up in Wordsworth’s and Keats’s poetic shadows, in a household filled with good artists, and in an era that encouraged the close study of natural phenomena. He was raised to fulfill the expectations of a milieu that privileged certain pursuits of noble leisure – drawing, poetry, piety. Hopkins was gifted at all of these pursuits. His siblings were also talented, and in their lifetimes more obviously accomplished than he: Lionel became an internationally renowned scholar of ancient Chinese; Arthur illustrated Thomas Hardy; Millicent, an excellent musician, became an Anglican nun. His mother loved Dickens and German philosophy. She was a descendent of the painter Gainsborough. His father, an insurance executive, published religious poetry. Everything about his family made it probable that Hopkins would pursue a path marked by art and an Oxford identity. Improbable, however, was his conversion at twenty-two to Roman Catholicism, the church of the unwashed and of a few rejected Oxford patricians like John Henry Newman and the younger Thomas Arnold.
The reactions of Hopkins’s parents and friends to his conversion were predictably negative. The poet’s father, Manley Hopkins, wrote to Canon Liddon:
Save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns her English converts. The deepness of our distress, the shattering of our hopes & the foreseen estrangement which must happen, are my excuse for writing to you so freely & so pressingly; but even these motives do not weigh with us in comparison of our pity for our dear son.5
This sentiment persisted among Hopkins’s associates for the rest of his life. A year after Hopkins died, Charles Luxmoore wrote to Arthur Hopkins: “Humanly speaking he made a grievous mistake in joining the Jesuits.”
There were other Catholic converts, of course, including five undergraduates in Hopkins’s class at Oxford. And there were other nature lovers, and other poets, like the Rossettis, drawn to a purer pre-Reformation past. But Hopkins eventually short-circuited all trends with his intrusive genius. You could say that he unintentionally spearheaded modernity in poetry. His closest friend, Bridges, buried Hopkins’s work for thirty years, and then presented it to a readership not quite ready; only after the second edition of the Poems came out in 1930, after Modernism and Imagism and free verse, did Hopkins’s confounding and game-changing contribution take off. It strutted the unabashed two-beat foot of common speech (“rash smart sloggering brine”) and Anglo-Saxonate kennings (wanwood, betweenpie, leafmeal). His new style reached all the way back, and all the way forward.
Hopkins’s legacy contains nagging contradictions: a master religious poet in the category of Donne and Herbert, he abandoned tradition by architecting wild verbal experiments. And then, he constantly protested his indifference to critical opinion and thus to poetic fame: he wrote to Robert Bridges, “You are my audience and I plan to convert you.” When accused of outwriting the wits of even this audience, he refused to give an inch: “I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I?” It seems, though, that while perhaps indifferent to fame, he certainly intended to broadcast something he kept seeing – that constant, recurrent presence of God. What indeed could anybody say?
By the end of his life, though he did not know he would soon die of typhoid (caused by antiquated plumbing in the Jesuit residence at 86 Stephen’s Green, Dublin), Hopkins complained in aggrieved sonnets, “Soul self, come poor Jackself, I do advise / You, jaded, let be” and “Birds build, but not I build; no, but strain / Time’s eunuch and not breed one work that wakes.” He felt far-flung, flattened, a failure. He was not destined to live long enough to reverse this feeling. If only he could have known that eventually Christians and literary critics alike would be ecstatic to claim him as their own: “Somewhat to their surprise … the public are being told by the best critics … that an English Jesuit who died over forty years ago must be regarded as one of England’s greatest poets.”6 Ultimately readers would find in Hopkins’s words a refreshing, liberating way of receiving and holding the body of God.
IN THE NEXT SECTION of this volume, “Christ Calls,” some of Hopkins’s early written material – poems, journal entries, and letters – will point the way to his later achievement. The poems express delirious idealism about religious life (“Heaven-Haven”), an early reflection on the sacramental possibilities of bread and wine (“Barnfloor and Winepress”), a sonnet written when he was twenty-one (“Myself Unholy”). His perceived unholiness also appears in scrupulously kept confessional notes, which include lists of sins such as oversleeping, talking too much, and looking at anatomical drawings in The Lancet. His scrupulosity was extreme, and it seems certain that Hopkins was a controlled, lifelong celibate.
The self-restraint he exerted from the time he decided on a religious vocation (1868) meant that he wrote no poetry for seven years; that same self-restraint created an ambitious, tempestuous, dramatic, iconoclastic, debut masterpiece in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–76), which he actually wrote under obedience. We will read this poem in Part III, “Reckoning with the Wreck.”
In 1872, three years before he determined that he was permitted to write poetry, Hopkins discovered the medieval Franciscan Duns Scotus’s commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (1250). Although his appropriation of Scotus (1266–1308) alienated his Jesuit examiners in the theologate (who preferred the teachings of the “Angelic Doctor,” Thomas Aquinas), Hopkins acquired both inspiration and consolation from Scotus’s special take on the well-worn medieval dialectic concerning universals and particulars. Hopkins’s sonnet “Duns Scotus’ Oxford” claims that the Franciscan “of all men most sways my spirit to peace.” For Scotus, individual things always resulted from a process he called “contraction,” by which universals contracted down into haecceitas, the “thisness” of particular concrete things. So affirmed by Scotus, Hopkins will write “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” Here Hopkins reveals what I consider his most significant contribution to the arts of living morally and of writing uniquely: the concept of “selving.” He cobbles it from an arcane point in Scotus’s commentary, runs with it, and from it springs the real originality of Hopkins’s opus. His idea of selving blends with a Victorian taste for precise detail. I believe that his discovery of Scotus enabled him to write the poems of the late 1870s, and determined how he would write them. We will read his nature poems in Part IV, “What I Do Is Me.”
The final section, “Wrestling with God,” will include writing from the last five years of his life (1884–89). Happiest as an undergraduate at “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd,
