Gerard Manley Hopkins

ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 is precisely the kind of thinking that one associates with the poets that Hoffpauir disapproves gives pause for thought. So, too, does the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, which has many, if not all, the virtues Hoffpauir praises, and yet is written by a poet who professes to write in the tradition of European modernism. Yeats or Hardy? It may very well be that a practicing poet searching for his voice has to choose—the case of Philip Larkin comes immediately to mind—but it is less clear that a reader of poetry has to. To think, in any case, of Yeats as a late Romantic is clearly sensible; to think of Hardy as only anti-Romantic is fraught with difficulty. Hardy's relations with his immediate poetic ancestors, with what amounts to a century of English poetry, are surely more complicated than simple antithesis. Hoffpauir, one strongly suspects, knows this to be the case. His own idea of tradition as a cherishing of what is handed down, as distinct from Eliot's idea of a cherishing of what is gained by one's own great labour, suggests as much. Yet Hoffpauir's notion of the stance toward Romanticism taken by the poets he approves appears to be one of simple rejection. For Hardy, for Graves, for Thomas, for Larkin even, a good part of what is handed down and cherished is Romantic. The Art of Restraint is nonetheless a good book. What is affirmed in the book is clear; one's attention is directed to particular poems which are praised or blamed for reasons that are set out with vigor. That one wants to argue with some of the books premises and conclusions only confirms the sort of value the book possesses. This is not only to appreciate what is thought-provoking, but to appreciate also the manner in which thought is provoked. Hoffpauir is a conservative critic who admires conservative poetry; but if Hoffpauir is correct in saying that the line of poets he delineates is a minority one, then to be conservative is, paradoxically, to challenge the reigning status quo. And that, I conceive, is one of the tasks of the critic. Peter Mitchell Grant MacEwan Community College Gerard Manley Hopkins Virginia Ridley Ellis. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. xviii + 352 pp. $35.00 ONE OF THE chief virtues of this book is that it "involves more use of the manuscript revisions than appears in most commentaries." However , unlike Norman MacKenzie's Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1981) and Paul Mariani's Commentary on the Complete Poems 120 BOOK REVIEWS of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), both cited extensively in the text, this book does not comment on all the mature poems, is not organized strictly chronologically, and permits discussion to develop "deviously" at times. Usually the poem or passage under consideration is quoted, paraphrased , "fairly obvious points" are summarized, and then "complexities come ... in battalions." Ellis's accounts of the multiple meanings of Hopkins's words often are very comprehensive and generate some readings of individual poems valuable "not merely to the specialist, but to any reader." Ellis does not align herself with the contemporary focus on Hopkins as a Victorian, nor the older representation of his poetry as modem. Like most Hopkins scholars, she focuses on Hopkins's "intense consciousness of individuality," in her case citing Hopkins's concept of the elective will which "in itself is man's personality or individuality and places him on a level of individuality in some sense with God." Hence it "is in the line and spirit of the firstborn, the great early Romantics, that Hopkins stands." She cites Harold Bloom's The Visionary Company (1961), but neither assimilates his later books nor replies to his essay rejecting Hopkins's membership in the visionary company. Though it is not cited, Ellis might have drawn support from David Downes's Hopkins'Sanctifying Imagination (1985) which attempts to demonstrate that Hopkins was a member of what "Bloom has called 'the visionary company'... a true inheritor of Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and the only Victorian 'high Romantic' ancestor...