Hopkins

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Hopkins studies in 2011 was the unusually high number of treatments afforded to the sound of his poetry rather than the sense (borrowing the old Pope/Perrine distinction). Given the appropriateness of a topical approach this year, the pleasure of that particular summary will be deferred until other approaches have been discussed.

Two monographs on Hopkins appeared during the calendar year. The more important of the two, Dennis Sobolev’s The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press), was reviewed extensively in these pages in a prior issue (please see VP 50, no. 2 [Summer 2012]: 254–256). Sobolev’s work is a major contribution to scholarship which students of Hopkins will need to consult.

Also published during the year was Angus Easson’s Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Routledge), the most recent in the Routledge Guides to Literature series, and here the verdict is mixed. The Easson book has three parts. The first (“Life and contexts,” pp. 3–40) is a biographical summary which proceeds on the assumption that the reader knows very little about Hopkins or his Victorian world—the Oxford Movement, for example, seems to require patient explanation. Easson is sympathetic to the poet, and he provides a very balanced treatment of such matters as Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism, his Oxford homo-social milieu, and his decision to enter the Jesuits. Whereas others have seen the Dublin years as a time of unleavened despair, Easson argues that the angst of 1884–1885 was tempered during the poet’s final three years by recovery and a measure of renewed hope.

Part 2, “Work” (pp. 41–124), offers a chronological survey of the poetry. He opens with a selective analysis of the early poems, the ones before “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” and of the journal entries out of which many of them arose. Easson is more charitable toward these early efforts than previous commentators such as Paul Mariani or Norman MacKenzie have been. But when Easson gets to the more significant works from “The Wreck” onward, comparisons with, for example, Mariani’s Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins or MacKenzie’s Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins do not work in Easson’s favor. In each case Easson provides a short summary of what the poem is about, a description of its meter, a note on its sources, and a brief evaluation. In almost every instance Mariani or MacKenzie provides much more detailed information on the poem and a more extended reading of it. Moreover there is the question of proportion: whereas “The Wreck” and the early poems occupy about half of Easson’s analysis, for example, “God’s Grandeur” gets only one paragraph and “Pied Beauty” only two sentences, with no information on such an important topic as the curtal sonnet. Other instances abound: “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?” gets two and a half pages, for example, while “Inversnaid” has only a short paragraph. A student looking to discover Hopkins’ major works will not be fully served. Moreover there are some errors that should have been caught. For example, Easson thinks the young Hopkins might have been seeing Rossetti paintings in the London galleries while writing the St. Dorothea poems—but Rossetti never exhibited in public after the age of twenty-one, avoiding all galleries and exhibitions and instead dealing only with wealthy private collectors such as Frederick Leyland, George Rae, and William Graham.

Part 3, “Criticism” (pp. 125–203), is also organized according to an approximate chronology; that is, it begins with Robert Bridges and ends with “new directions 1992–2008.” But within that framework there are a bewildering number of subcategories. Brief summaries of works of criticism are arranged sometimes by chronology (“critical approaches 1944–1972”), sometimes by book type (“biographical shaping 1930–1992”), sometimes by topic (“nature and aesthetics”), sometimes by technique (“diction and syntax”). Often the summaries are very illuminating—his treatment of the work of the late Alison Sulloway, for example, is cogent and appropriate. Also Easson’s sympathy with Hopkins (“As a reader of Hopkins...