


Gerard Manley Hopkins
Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley
Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He
was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended college
in Oxford in 1863, and studied Classics.
In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via
sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to
Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins
into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to
become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate
near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it
were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry
he had written to date and would not write poems again until
1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses
throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next
seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching in London,
Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19690/19690
-h/19690-h.htm
In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the
Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames
River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died.
Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem "The Wreck of the
Deutschland" introduced what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm." By not
limiting the number of "slack" or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed
for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. In
1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in
Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever. Although his poems
were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges
edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.





Never saw his work published
Is considered the most innovative of the
Victorian poets
Very precise and meticulous person.
Very difficult to get along with.
Came up with the idea of inscape- each
being in the universe enacts its identity.
 The
individually distinctive inner
structure or nature of a thing.
 Man is the most “selved” being in
the universe and thus recognizes
the inscape of other beings (the
act of instress).
 Recognizing
the inscape in others
leads one to God, because the
inscape is a divine creation.
 Poetry was a celebration of
inscape by capturing the specific
identity of his subjects


In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms,
"inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion.
By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics
that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it
from other things, and by "instress" he means either the
force of being which holds the inscape together or the
impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the
mind of the beholder:
There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly
holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the
ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring
of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the
inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though
with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part
shut and instress cannot come.



The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time,"
Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a
characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape
is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows
us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/
. . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "
Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from
the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats,
through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and
the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence
that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed
to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that
consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse
written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with
the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art
for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical
pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth
century.

Lines have a set number of stresses,
but the placement is varied
Lóok at the stárs! Lóok! Look úp at the skíes!
O lóok at all the fíre- fólk sítting in the áir
The bríght bóroughs, the círcle- cítadels thére!
Dówn in the dím woods the díamond délves! The élves eyes!





Hopkins usually takes the traditional metre of the
English sonnet form, which is iambic pentameter (five
groups, or feet, of two syllables; each foot consisting of
an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one – de
dum / de dum). He then:
Introduces extra unstressed syllables to the line,
extending its length, or
Sometimes he even adds an extra foot, to give the line
six or even seven feet
Sometimes he marks these additions with little loops
under the syllables, which he calls ‘outriders’.
This extended sound pattern is what he calls ‘sprung
rhythm’. It is moving towards a freer verse form, but
still using traditional poetic structures as a base.


Individuation:
Conscious and the unconscious=self
actualisation


Asceticism
“For Lent no pudding on Sundays. No tea,
except if to keep me awake and then without
sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in
Passion week or in Fridays. Not to sit in
armchair except can work no other way. Ash
Wednesday and Good Friday bread and
water.” (Gardner 1963:41)




Tractarian
Muscular Christianity
It has been argued that the birth of Muscular
Christianity in Victorian Britain forged a strong
“. . . link between Christianity and sport” that
“. . . has never been broken” (Crepeau)
Crepeau, Richard C. 2001 Playing with God:
The History of Athletes Thanking the “Big Man
Upstairs”.

http://www.veritesport.co.uk/downloads/file
s/theology_of_sport/pdf/The_Development_o
f_Muscular_Christianity_in_Victorian_Britain_
and_Beyond.pdf












THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
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.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—Because the Holy
Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright
wings.









Sibilance
Personification
Imagery
Alliteration
Neologisms
Enjambement
Metaphor
Simile
Tone
 Onomatopoeia
Form
Etc…
I HAD sat next, at luncheon, to an old gentleman who owned to eighty-six
years, and a fine impressive machine he looked, as he told me how much
he had enjoyed his long life. `If a man—or a schoolboy for that matter —',
he continued, `does not get on well, it's his own fault. I well remember,
when I first went to Eton, the head-boy called us together, and pointing to a
little fellow with a mass of curly red hair, said, "If ever you see that boy, kick
him—and if you are too far off to kick him, throw a stone." . . . He was a
fellow named Swinburne,' he added. `He used to write poetry for a time, I
believe, but I don't know what became of him.‘
Sitwell, Noble Essences, pp. 112-113.