Hopkins and Heidegger (review)

It is always good to find Gerard Manley Hopkins taken seriously philosophically. As the title of Brian Willems’s study makes clear, it approaches Hopkins and Martin Heidegger as on a par with one another: as synchronous, fraternally alliterative, and sharing the same metaphysical preoccupations. This facilitates some subtle and enlightening appreciations of the relation between words and being in Hopkins, especially of the generative ways in which bald repetition and other “stuttering” effects function in the more audacious and liminal works upon which this book focuses: The Wreck of the Deutschland (1918), “Binsey Poplars” (1918), “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” (1918), and “Carrion Comfort” (1918) (34). The first two of these poems are reprinted in an appendix to the book, the other two in the body of the text itself. These thoughtful inclusions suggest that it is aimed not so much at readers familiar with Hopkins, who might have a copy of his poetry on their shelves, but rather at those who are more likely to be acquainted with Heidegger and recent continental philosophy.

Certainly these poems, and similar works discussed here, such as the coda to “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire [. . .]” (1918), resonate with the various self-effacing dialectics developed by Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Maurice Blanchot. Consequently, important lines of poetry from these difficult poems, which are often side-stepped or neglected by other studies, are unflinchingly explicated here. In particular, chapter 3 is composed of sections devoted to discussing discretely each word in the opening line of “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” as an unfolding evocation of Heidegger’s principle of the Fourfold; it is a fine reminder that the advent of theory in literary studies has not exiled close reading skills but made them more exacting.

At its best, this study provides apt and bold conceptual contexts in which the troubling extremities, ostensible failures, and ungainly baroque gestures of Hopkins’s poetry are explicated crisply, their desperate dynamics nicely disclosed and pursued. On the other hand, this approach risks anachronism and driven readings, as, beginning with Heidegger on Friedrich Hölderlin, it could be seen to gradually annex Hopkins for Heidegger, to retrofit his ideas, almost through a sort of alliterative slippage between them. Some discussion of Hopkins’s own being-in-time, of the historicity of his idiosyncratic metaphysics and poetry, would have been beneficial here (and would be appreciated by readers of Victorian Studies). Among some careless references to, for instance, Jude Nixon as “her” (16), and the date of Hopkins’s death and Heidegger’s birth as 1899 rather than 1889, a disregard of history is suggested by the author’s casual gloss on “Binsey Poplars,” which was composed in 1879, as “written upon the felling of a number of aspen trees outside Oxford during the poet’s college days” (11–12). Hopkins’s studies at Oxford from 1863 to 1867 furnished him with groundings in pre-Socratic philosophy, G. W. F. Hegel, and Hegelian readings of Aristotle; these are nodal points that help to explain how his thought developed into forms and expressions that could converge with those of Heidegger. The observation that “there is an incorporation and a denial of what is destroyed in the poems, and it is this coexistence that is instress” (17), or other discussions of dialectics of presence and negation, could be glossed through Hopkins’s familiarity with the Hegelian principle of Aufhebung. Heideggerian ideas of strife are discussed in relation to Hopkins, but not the Heraclitean principle of strife he knew so well. A citation from John Bruin on the artwork’s “materiality” as making “an explicit connection between Heidegger and Hopkins” could have been pursued profitably and radically through Hopkins’s early reading of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) and his subsequent discovery of John Duns Scotus (qtd. in Willems 57).

There is also no mention of Hopkins’s 1868 notebook on pre-Socratic philosophy, which was published in its entirety in 2006, including the...