Book Review: "The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins"

Please note that I bought this book at Eighth Day Books. 

I have been reading and studying the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins since I was a undergraduate English major, and before. This may be one of the very best books about him that I have ever read. I think the organization of the book facilitates its impact: Ellsberg supports her analysis of Hopkins's life and works with his poetry and prose in each part. My review comments are included in the outline of the Contents below.

From the publisher, Plough Books:

Gerard Manley Hopkins deserves his place among the greatest poets in the English language. He ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English-language poets, surpassed only by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth.

Yet when the English Jesuit priest died of typhoid fever at age forty-four, he considered his life a failure. He never would have suspected that his poems, which would not be published for another twenty-nine years, would eventually change the course of modern poetry and influence such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Along with his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Hopkins revolutionized poetic language.

And yet we love Hopkins not only for his literary genius but for the hard-won faith that finds expression in his verse. Who else has captured the thunderous voice of God and the grandeur of his creation on the written page as Hopkins has?

Seamlessly weaving together selections from Hopkins’s poems, letters, journals, and sermons, Margaret Ellsberg lets the poet tell the story of a life-long struggle with faith that gave birth to some of the best poetry of all time. Even readers who spurn religious language will find in Hopkins a refreshing, liberating way to see God’s hand at work in the world.

Edited with commentary written by Margaret R. Ellsberg

Foreword by Dana Gioia (I was surprised that Gioia did not mention Saint Robert Southwell, SJ or Richard Crashaw as religious poets in his survey of those who preceded Hopkins, who revived the genre)

Contents:

Part I. Incompatible Excellences: An Introduction

*Three Highlights

    --Transubstantiation: when Hopkins discovered this Catholic teaching: that the words spoken during the Canon of the Mass effect the change of bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, it was essential to his faith and his creativity: "never again could language prove merely decorative"

    --Creation: renewed constantly, even as it decays and dies: Hopkins's descriptions and drawings of nature: detailed and beautiful

    --Influence of Blessed Duns Scotus and haecceitas (pp. 12-13):

        " . . . Scotus's special take on the well-worn medieval debate concerning universals and particulars. . . . 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. . . . the concept of "selving" [for Hopkins].  . . . His idea of of selving blends with a Victorians taste for precise detail." 

*** One of the best explanations I've read of this essential concept for understanding Hopkins's creative impulses.

Part II. Christ Calls

*Highlights:

    --His conversion from Tractarian Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1866 (five other undergraduates at the time converted too)

    --His connection to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory and his communication to his father and family about his conversion

    --Error on page 19: Nicholas Wiseman was the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster appointed by Pope Pius IX in 1850, not Henry Manning, who would succeed him (error repeated in the chronology at the back of the book)

        Poems (1864-1868)

        Letters (1866-1874)

        Journals (1864-1875)

Part III. Reckoning with the Wreck

    --Hopkins joined the Jesuits in 1868 and stopped writing poetry; after the five German nuns died in the wreck because of the Falk Laws in the Kulterkampf, his superior asked him to write something!

    --written in the form of a Pindaric victory ode

        "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

        Letters (1877-1878)          

Part IV. What I Do Is Me

--Because Hopkins (such a brilliant scholar at Balliol) preferred Scotus over Aquinas, his academic career as a Jesuit was stymied

--He was moved around to different missions and seldom achieved measurable success

        Poems (1877-1882)

        Letters (1879-1883)

        Sermons (very Ignatian with composition of place, etc)

            Oxford (at St. Aloysius)

            Bedford Leigh

            Liverpool

        Spiritual Writings

        Retreat Notes

Part V. Wrestling with God

 --Time in Dublin in 1884-1890 at Newman's Dublin University, teaching Latin and Greek, grading exam papers from mostly disappointing students

--Deplorable housing (plumbing) conditions for the Jesuits; Hopkins ill and exhausted

        Poems (1884-1889)

        *the "Terrible Sonnets"

        *"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

        Letters (1884-1890)

        Devotional Writings (1883-1889)

**Ellsberg moderates a debate between those who see a profound conflict between Hopkins's vocation as Catholic (Jesuit) priest and his talent as a poet; from the evidence of his poetry, letters, spiritual and devotional writings, and his sermons, it seems clear to me that he had found great peace with The Holy Trinity and with the faith of the Catholic Church. He never doubted; he had difficulties, as Newman says, but not doubts. His vision of God's Creation, of--to use another idea from Newman--the visible world and the invisible world and his poetic method were both secure. Hopkins would not change the latter even though Coventry Patmore nor others, even his friend Robert Bridges, could understand what he was achieving. 

I don't think that Hopkins had a "struggle with faith" (contrary to the publisher's blurb) as a theological virtue; he believed in God; he believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Resurrection; he trusted in the beauty of Creation and God's love. That Faith was the source of his inspiration. Hopkins struggled with--as we all do--life: its disappointments and difficulties, our failures and frustrations, the misunderstandings of others. His poetry reflects how he reconciled life with Faith through his trust in God.

Back matter:

A Chronology

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines