Readers' Responses to Hopkins

BOOK REVIEWS influence does he say much about the poems, and there he uses them to make comparisons between Pater and Hopkins as a way of proving the influence, not to analyze them in light of the influence. Marucci declares at the outset that he will be working with Hopkins's letters, journals, essays, and sermons as weU as the poems, but he does devote two long passages, each about twenty pages long, to The Wreck of the Deutschland." The first of these comes at the end of the section on rhetoric and is intended to demonstrate how Hopkins's idiosyncratic style is a rhetorical strategy to elicit non-logical and emotional responses in the reader. This first part of the book begins very promisingly indeed, but the application of the hypothesis to the poem is little more than a matter of pointing out various rhetorical figures without explaining their function. The second passage on the poem comes at the end of the second part of the book, and here the poem is used only to illustrate the characteristics of Hopkins's medievalism. For both authors, therefore, the poetry is a means to an end (and not even the primary means, equal attention being given to letters, journals, sermons, and essays), rather than an end in itself. Their chief concern is in identifying Hopkins as a Victorian or as a medievalist, and their books will be useful in helping readers understand the influences that made him one or the other. Surely, though, Hopkins's primary identity, his essential nature, is his poetical one. He may be medieval or Victorian or modern or a combination of aU three, but he is indisputably a poet, and it is as a poet that he claims our attention. Whatever else he may be matters only insofar as it illuminates this, his principal identity. Michael Bright Eastern Kentucky University Readers' Responses to Hopkins Michael Allsopp and David Downes, eds. Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. χ + 351 pp. $54.00 HOPKINS CRITICISM seems to be driven by anniversaries. The last of fourteen books (nine of them collections of essays) commemorating the centenary of his death (1889-1989) was published in 1993, and now this coUection, the first of those commemorating the 150 year anniversary of his birth (1844-1994), has arrived. This is not a new trend. In the past Hopkins scholars resorted to anniversaries of individual poems. In 1976, for example, Readings of the Wreck commemorated the centenary of the writing of that poem. 395 ELT 38:3 1995 For that coUection, Peter Mîlward, S.J., invited "contributions of a less academic, more personal nature, considering (with Newman) that the true appreciation of literature is subjective rather than objective" (vü). Nevertheless, the only article even beginning to respond to his call was the last one, a brief memoir by Ruth Seelhammer primarily about other Hopkins scholars. Now, almost twenty years later, that call is answered in the final essay in this coUection. In it David Downes recounts his deeply personal response to reading Hopkins. He may have described a paradigm that fits most Hopkins scholars. I know that I, for one, foUowed the same pattern of briefly encountering Hopkins for the first time in a college literature class, reading him in depth only in graduate school, and having difficulty finding anyone to serve on my committee once I decided to write a dissertation on him. More importantly , now, looking back on almost thirty years of reading and writing about Hopkins, I too have begun to connect "Hopkins with my own self-development in ways I then did not fuUy understand." For me as well "among the first such self-understandings Hopkins afforded... was in associating beauty in nature as a direct contact with God." Then his "kingfisher" sonnet was "a primary poetic catalyst," enabling me also to detect "the light of a caring Presence from on high in the shadows of self-formation" as well as in nature. Recently, I too have turned to his final sonnets about "disappointment, failure, aging, and dying, all in some sense lost dreams" and realized that I had been drawn to him all...