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A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins by Norman H. MacKenzie (review)
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 51, Number 4, Summer 1982
- pp. 430-432
- Review
- Additional Information
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4)0 LETTERS IN CANAOA 1981 Draft and later revision now possesses a dramatic nature with the parallel printing of the two texts. The nearly 250 pages devoted to Mill's literary essays, only two of which appeared in Dissertations and Discussions (1859) in any entirety, provide perhaps the most important examples of Mill's literary ideas yet available. Although they establish no coherent literary theory, the essays none the less reveal him as a sensitive practical critic and also as a writer forging a theoretical approach to literature. 'Thoughts on Poetry and lts Varieties' (18))) contains his best-known ideas on poetry, the first section having been published as 'What is Poetry?: but in his 18)5 essay on Tennyson's Poems (reprinted here for the first time) Mill enlarges his earlier concepts. His later essay in particular stresses the importance of feeling and thought in poetry, the product of what he calls 'cultivated reason.' He expresses this when he writes that there are 'in the character of every true poet, two elements, for one of which he is indebted to nature, for the other to cultivation: In his reviews of Vigny, Milnes, and Macaulay, also included, Mill extends his ideas on the social and cultural functions of poetry. The appendices in the Autobiography and Literary Essays contain two very significant items: a selection of extracts from 'Rejected Leaves of the Early Draft' and Helen Taylor's continuation of the Autobiography, which summari2es the period between the last section written by Mill, covering the years 1869-70, and his death in 187). The entire volume, then, establishes for the first time the complete text and context for reading the Autobiography. In the compilation of variants, cancelled passages, ancillary materials, annotations, and bibliography the first volume of The Collected Works gains the prominence it deserves - providing the fullest and most authoritative edition of the Autobiography and Mill's literary essays in print. (IRA BRUCE NADEL) Norman H. MacKenzie. A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins Thames and Hudson. 256. £).50 paper Norman MacKemie's Reader's Guide is a small encyclopedia ofinformation on Hopkins as schoolboy, Oxonian, man, poet, priest, and on Hopkins the world-be participant in English Victorian letters, philology, classical studies, music, art, science, and patriotic aspiration. MacKenzie, who is professor of English at Queen's University, has unmatched qualifications for being a reader's guide to Hopkins. His decades-long familiarity with the poetic texts in their frequently pied states; his equal ease with the other writings; his knowledge of the eddies and pools of Hopkins's time as well as the currents; his skill in Latin, Greek, ornithology, iconography (to name a few) - all enable him to HUMANITIES 431 follow as close to the track ofHopkins as anyone of our generation can do. The Reader's Guide contains six parts, beginning with a short, careful chronology of Hopkins's life. Notable is MacKenzie's specificity: the picture of a life emerges under his hand, even in a few pages. He does not gloss over in generalities or unrelated facts. His centred factuality is constant and admirable in this book. The early poems receive ten pages of individualized discussion - too brief, but they are predictably the victims ofspace. The mature poems are commented on, one by one, in almost two hundred pages. Brief discussions of fragments and unfinished poems, early and mature, make two more sections. Finally, a 'Reference Section' gives thumbnail biographies of Baillie, Bridges, Dixon, Duns Scotus, and Patmore, and critical interpretations of Hopkins's own technical terms. Dozens of critics and thousands of readers have tried to catch 'The Windhover' without knowing much about kestrels. MacKenzieshows the need to look at a windhover before looking at what is now thewindhover. He does not, however, ignore the luxuriant criticism of this sonnet; he masterfully summarizes and evaluates: 'Kestrels do not drop inertly like a stone. The application of 'buckle' in the sense of 'collapse' to the controlled stoop of any falcon must, from an ornithologist's viewpoint, be considered as uninformed as it would be if used ofan Olympichigh-diver. Nor can I easily accept an attacking hunter as a symbol of sacrifice...