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  • An Artist at Odds with Himself and His World
  • Henry Hart (bio)
Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani (Viking, 2008. 496 pages. $34.95)

Having begun his scholarly career with A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and having recently published the memoir Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, Paul Mariani is well suited to write a biography of Hopkins. Although other biographies of the Victorian poet exist, Mariani's familiarity with St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises gives him a unique perspective since it was this book that guided much of Hopkins's religious career and many of his finest poems. The fact that the subjects of Mariani's last three biographies—Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman—were deeply influenced by Hopkins also makes Mariani especially well qualified to write about the poet's life and legacy.

To distinguish his biography from preceding ones, Mariani took a chance by composing it as a journal. For the most part his colloquial style, constant use of the present tense, and numerous quotations from Hopkins's journals give the impression that he—Mariani—is a fellow traveler, a kind of latter-day Boswell recording what his subject is drinking, worrying about, looking at, writing, and reading on particular days. The narrative structure provides a sense of immediacy and intimacy that more formal biographies sometimes lack. As Michael Dirda has pointed out in Book World, Mariani does a good job of tracing the upheavals in Hopkins's spiritual and artistic life, but "also includes the kind of human details that vivify a biography."

Mariani begins his story in medias res—on July 18, 1866—when Hopkins will soon turn twenty-two and make his momentous conversion from the Anglican faith of his parents to the Roman Catholicism of his mentor, John Henry Newman. Mariani backtracks to discuss the impulses behind this conversion, returns to Hopkins's birth date (July 28, 1844) for a discussion of his family and upbringing, then jumps forward to August 28, 1866, for a fuller account of the conflicts engendered by his conversion. What emerges from Mariani's narrative is a portrait of an artist at odds with himself, his parents, his poetic contemporaries, his country, and even his fellow Jesuits, whose religious order he joined in 1868.

Like many of the modernists who followed him, Hopkins was a baffling mix of revolutionary and reactionary attitudes. His first act of rebellion was against his parents' religious principles. According to his father, this rebellion was devastating: "His determination to join the Church of Rome," his father wrote an Oxford minister, was a "blow . . . so deadly & great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it." His second most significant rebellion was poetic. Although as a poet he employed traditional stanzaic and rhyming patterns and wrote about traditional Victorian subjects such as God and nature, his idiosyncratic syntax and obscure diction were calculated to disorient the audience of the day. Perhaps realizing the effect his poems [End Page lxxiii] would have on Victorian readers, he was shy about circulating them. In the end he showed them to only three or four people. His closest friend, the future poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, confirmed his fears of an unsympathetic audience when he mocked his most ambitious experiment, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Bridges vowed never to read the poem again, no matter how much money he was paid. Years after Hopkins died, Bridges decided to publish the poems Hopkins had sent him in manuscript, but he continued to lampoon "The Wreck of the Deutschland" as "a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance" to Hopkins's oeuvre.

The fact that Hopkins remained loyal to his insulting friend says something about his own divisions and self-loathing. It was almost as if he internalized his conservative critics and partly agreed with them. Contemptuous of the poems he wrote before becoming a Jesuit, he burned them, vowed to write no more, and, when he could not help writing more and when a periodical (The Month) rejected "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Loss of...

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