Hopkins, Gerard Manley. (1844 - 1889).
L i f e
- converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest
- a friend of Robert Bridges who became his literary executor and editor
W o r k
- hailed as a pioneering figure of ‘modern’ literature x but: his experiments emerge from the 19th century culture
- his rhythm, metre, and syntax are modern x but: his concern with the imagination shaping the natural world remains within the Romantic tradition
< influenced by the 13th century philosopher Duns Scotus:
(a) ‘inscape’ = the distinctive design constituting the individual identity
(b) ‘instress’ = the recognition of the inscape of other things
- the specific distinctiveness of an object is the stamp of divine creation on it: the instress leads a human being to Christ
- the aim of poetry is inscape: each poem should have a unique design capturing the initial inspiration
- preoccupied with celebrating the wonders of God’s creation x but: aware of pain, of the humankind marring the beauty of nature, and of violence in the animal world
- violates syntactic order to represent the shape of mental experience: omits syntactical connections, uses ellipsis and repetition
- coins and compounds words to represent the uniqueness of an object, uses puns to suggest how God’s creation rhymes in a divine patterning
- uses ‘sprung rhythm’ = a line with a given number of stresses x but: a highly variable number and placement of unstressed syllables
- mature period: experiments with a ‘new rhythm’, apprehension of beauty
- late period: ‘terrible sonnets’ = despair of a barely comprehended God comprehending all things
“The Wreck of Deutschland” (1876):
- a rhapsodic ode about the wreck of a ship in which 5 nuns were drowned
- the editor of a Jesuit magazine ‘dared not print it’
“God’s Grandeur” (1877):
- a God-centred poem
“The Windhover” (published 1918):
- on the beast’s predatorial ecstatic swoop and its beauty
- the ‘brutality’ of the windhover is the essence of its animal perfection
“Pied Beauty” (published 1918):
- on the harmonised oppositions expressing the energy of the world
- the world is miracuously held together by a divine force
Basics
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Gerard Manley Hopkins. (1844 - 1889). British. -
Work
Poet. Advocate of sprung rhythm. -
Genres
Late Victorian period. Nature poetry. Devotional poetry.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Quote
"Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod."
From "God's Grandeur" (1877).