Gerard Manley Hopkins Biography PDF

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 1844-188 9 It has been said that the most important date in Gerard Manley Hopkins\'s career was 1918, twenty-nine years after his death, for it was then that the first publication of his poems made them accessible to the world of readers. During his lifetime these remarkab...

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 1844-188 9 It has been said that the most important date in Gerard Manley Hopkins\'s career was 1918, twenty-nine years after his death, for it was then that the first publication of his poems made them accessible to the world of readers. During his lifetime these remarkable poems, most of them celebrating the wonders of God\'s creation, had been known only to a small circle of friends, including his literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges, who waited until 1918 before releasing them to a publisher. Partly because his work was first made public in a twentieth-century volume, but especially because of his striking experiments in meter and diction, Hopkins was widely hailed as a pioneering figure of \"modern\" literature, miraculously unconnected with his fellow Victorian poets (who during the 1920s and 1930s were largely out of fashion among critical readers). And this way of classifying and evaluating his writings has long persisted. In 1936 a substantial selection of his poems led off The Faher Book of Modern Verse, one of the most influential anthologies of the century, featuring poets such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot (the only one whose selections occupy more pages than those allotted to Hopkins). And the first four editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962---79) grouped Hopkins with these twentieth-century poets. To reclassify him is not to repudiate his earlier reputation as a \"modern\" but rather to suggest that his work can be better understood and appreciated if it is restored to the Victorian world out of which it developed. Hopkins was born near London into a large and cultivated family in comfortable circumstances. After a brilliant career at Highgate School, he entered Oxford in 1863, where he was exposed to a variety of Victorian ways of thinking, both secular and religious. Among the influential leaders at Oxford was Matthew Arnold, professor of poetry; but more important for Hopkins was his tutor, Walter Pater, an aesthetician whose emphasis on the intense apprehension of sensuous beauty struck a responsive chord in Hopkins. At Oxford he was also exposed to the Broad Church theology of one of the tutors at his college (Balliol), Benjamin Jowett. But Hopkins became increasingly attracted first to the High Church movement represented at Oxford by Edward Pusey, and then to Roman Catholicism. Profoundly influenced by John Henry Newman\'s conversion to Rome and by subsequent conversations with New- man, Hopkins entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. The estrangement from his family that resulted from his conversion was very painful for him; his parents\' letters to him were so \"terrible\" (he reported to Newman) that he could not bear to \"read them twice.\" And this alienation was heightened by his decision not only to become a Roman Catholic but to become a priest and, in particular, a Jesuit priest, for many Victorian Protestants regarded the Jesuit order with a special distrust. For the rest of his life, Hopkins served as a priest and teacher in various places, among them Oxford, Liverpool, and Lancashire. In 1884 he was appointed professor of clas- sics at University College in Dublin. At school and at Oxford in the early 1860s, Hopkins had written poems in the vein of John Keats. He burned most of these early writings after his conversion (although drafts survive), for he believed that his vocation must require renouncing such per- sonal satisfactions as the writing of poems. Only after his superiors in the church encouraged him to do so did he resume writing poetry. Yet during the seven years of silence, as his letters show, he had been thinking about experimenting with what he called a \"new rhythm.\" The result, in 1876, was his rhapsodic lyric-narrative, \"The Wreck of the Deutschland,\" a long ode about the wreck of a ship in which five Fran- ciscan nuns were drowned. The style of the poem was so distinctive that the editor of the Jesuit magazine to which he had submitted it \"dared not print it,\" as Hopkins reported. During the remaining fourteen years of his life, Hopkins wrote poems but seldom submitted them for publication, partly because he was convinced that poetic fame was incompatible with his religious vocation but also because of a fear that readers would be discouraged by the eccentricity of his work. Hopkins\'s sense of his own uniqueness is in accord with the larger philosophy that informs his poetry. Drawing on the theology of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher, he felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe \"selves,\" that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize its specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. In the act of instress, therefore, the human being becomes a celebrant of the divine, at once recognizing God\'s creation and enacting his or her own God-given identity within it. Poetry for Hopkins enacts this celebration. It is instress, and it realizes the inscape of its subject in its own distinctive design. Hopkins wrote, \"But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling \'inscape\' is what I above all aim at in poetry.\" To create inscape, Hopkins seeks to give each poem a unique design that captures the initial inspiration when he is \"caught\" by his subject. Many of the characteristics of Hop- kins\'s style---his disruption of conventional syntax, his coining and compounding of words, his use of ellipsis and repetition---can be understood as ways of representing the stress and action of the brain in moments of inspiration. He creates compounds to represent the unique interlocking of the characteristics of an object---\"piece- bright,\" \"dapple-dawn-drawn,\" \"blue-bleak.\" He omits syntactical connections to fuse qualities more intensely---\"the dearest freshness deep down things.\" He creates puns to suggest how God\'s creation rhymes and chimes in a divine patterning. He violates conventional syntactic order to represent the shape of mental experience. In the act of imaginative apprehension, a language particular to the moment generates itself. Hopkins also uses a new rhythm to give each poem its distinctive design. In the new metric system he created, which he called sprung rhythm, lines have a given number of stresses, but the number and placement of unstressed syllables is highly variable. Hopkins rarely marks all the intended stresses, only those that readers might not anticipate. To indicate stressed syllables, Hopkins often uses both the stress (\') and the \"great stress\" (\"). A curved line marks an \"outride\"---one or more syllables added to a foot but not counted in the scansion of the line; they indicate a stronger stress on the preceding syllable and a short pause after the outride. Here, for example, is the scansion for the first three lines of \"The Windhover\": I caught this morning morning\'s minion, king- dom of daylight\'s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding Hopkins argued that sprung rhythm was the natural rhythm of common speech and written prose, as well as of music. He found a model for it in Old English poetry and in nursery rhymes, but he claimed that it had not been used in English poetry since the Elizabethan age. The density and difficulty that result from Hopkins\'s unconventional rhythm and syntax make his poetry seem modern, but his concern with the imagination\'s shaping of the natural world puts him very much in the Romantic tradition; and his creation of a rough and difficult style, designed to capture the mind\'s own motion, resembles the style of Robert Browning. \"A horrible thing has happened to me,\" Hopkins wrote in 1864, \"I have begun to doubt Tennyson.\" He criticizes Tennyson for using the grand style as a smooth and habitual poetic speech. Like Algernon Charles Swin- burne, Walter Pater, and Henry James as well as Browning, Hopkins displays a new mannerism, characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century, which para- doxically combines an elaborate aestheticism with a more complex representation of consciousness. In Hopkins\'s early poetry his singular apprehension of the beauty of individual objects always brings him to an ecstatic illumination of the presence of God. But in his late poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, his distinctive individuality comes to isolate him from the God who made him thus. Hopkins wrote, \"To me there is no resemblance: searching nature, I taste sel/but at one tankard, that of my own being\" In the terrible sonnets Hopkins confronts the solipsism to which his own stress on individuality seems to lead him. Like the mad speakers of so many Victorian dramatic monologues, he cannot escape a world solely of his own imagining. Yet even these poems of despair, which simultaneously echo the bleaker side of the Romantic tra- dition and anticipate more modern attitudes, reflect a traditional religious vision: the dark night of the soul as described by the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross. In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats calls Hopkins\'s poetry \"a last development of poetical diction.\" Yeats\'s remark indicates the anomaly that Hopkins\'s work poses. Perhaps it is only appropriate for a writer who stressed the uniqueness of inscape to strike us with the individuality of his achievement.