Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (review)

James I. Wimsatt's book Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape is not a study of Gerard Manley Hopkins the poet so much as a study of Hopkins the theorist of poetic language. In its narrowest project the book addresses itself mainly to Hopkins specialists, proposing a revision of the standard interpretations of the poet's difficult, disjointed, and sometimes contradictory writings on poetics. At a broader level, the book seeks to place Hopkins in a lineage of thinkers on semiotics that stretches from Plato and the Greeks to Charles Sanders Peirce in the nineteenth century and Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva in the twentieth—a group of theorists united by the shared idea that the sound of language is a locus of affective meaning separate from the lexical sense. The observation that such a view has been, for the last century or so, a minority position among theorists of language leads Wimsatt to question the adequacy of our current conceptions of the relations between sound and meaning, both in poetry and in language in general. The implications of his study are wide ranging and important; they force us to question our standard critical assumptions about what poetry is and how it ought to be read and described. Yet the book is timid in exploring its broadest implications, and tentative, as well, in the bridges it builds between the private world of Hopkins's unpublished and even unfinished philosophical writings and the larger history of literary and critical practice.

Wimsatt grounds his exploration of Hopkins's theory of "poeticalness" in a text, "Poetry and Verse" (1873–74), that he suggests has been largely neglected by critics of Hopkins's poetics, who have overemphasized Hopkins's ideas about the structures of parallelism, rhyme, and repetition, the favorite topics of the poet's undergraduate essays on poetics. Hopkins's mature thinking about the nature of poetry was, according to Wimsatt, rather different. Whereas in his early writings Hopkins had assumed that the essence of poetry was more or less the same as the essence of verse, by the time he drafted "Poetry and Verse" he evidently believed that the essential quality of poeticalness was something independent of verse—a quality of speech itself. "Poetry and Verse" was written fairly early in Hopkins's career—a few years before he began working on The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), the poem with which he broke his seven-year abstention from poetry and in which he inaugurated a radical new style. But the fragment was written after he had discovered the philosophy of Scotus and begun to articulate his theory of inscape, and during years when, presumably, he was already feeling the visitations of the "new rhythm" he tells us he had "long had haunting [his] ear" by the time he wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland. Cryptic and fragmentary though it may be ("a vexing piece," Wimsatt calls it, "because of its parentheses and constricted explanations" [4]), "Poetry and Verse" provides a key statement of Hopkins's ideas about the relationships among sprung rhythm, inscape, and speech itself, a statement that becomes the basis in Wimsatt's book of a new account of Hopkins's theory of poetry.

Poetry, for Hopkins, takes its essence from its power to reveal a quality that belongs to all speech and that might be called its "inscape": the figure an utterance makes "over and above" its lexical meaning, which figure (carried often in sound) becomes a repository of affective meaning. Hopkins's theory of poetry, in Wimsatt's view, also recognizes something further, which is that language—all language, but especially (or most markedly) the language of poetry—has a shape and a rhythm even before it has a content. This aspect of the nature of language, Wimsatt explains, is something that poets (T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, P. B. Shelley, and Paul...