Gerard Manley Hopkins

How is the twenty-first-century Hopkins critic to explore the link between Hopkins’s faith and his poetry, while choosing to examine this link within—or without—Hopkins’s specific literary, religious, social, and personal context and taking into account contemporary critical methods and approaches, as well as the critic’s own inevitable standpoint with regard to the poet’s beliefs? And is the Hopkins as Victorian or Modernist (still) a dichotomy? These are, in the main, the central questions—explicit or underlying—in the various publications on Hopkins to be discussed here. Two books published in 2017 deal with the relationship between Hopkins’s faith and his poetic praxis. While the subject can hardly be claimed to be original—witness the plethora of notes and references that abound in both works—Hopkins himself saw his spiritual life and his writing life as inseparable. Any reading of Hopkins, however well meant in scholarly terms, that sees his religious options as mechanisms of repression that only served to reinforce his already overscrupulous nature is mistaken.

Martin Dubois’s fine, detailed, and extremely thoughtful study Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017) tackles questions raised by the connections between Hopkins’s poetry writing and his religious experience while taking the poet’s religion as he himself took it: as the foundation of his life and work. Dubois’s account of instress and inscape reveals something of the nature of the difficulties posed, for the critic, by such connections, since (a) Hopkins began to evolve these terms quite independently of his poetry writing, that is, in his early essays, and (b) because they are, as Dubois rightly states, “philosophical coinages,” concepts originally having nothing to do with either poetry or religious experience as such and, once established, applied to many other things besides poetry and spirituality. Here a deeper study of Hopkins’s Oxford essays and poems (and even notebooks) taken together, might have been warranted, especially given the relative shortness of the book (the six chapters that constitute the main body of the text take up less than 150 pages altogether). Dubois’s title—the poetry of religious experience—as opposed to “poetry of religious experience,” seems essentialist and would perhaps require a broader literary canvas in which to set Hopkins’s poetry. George Herbert, for instance, is never quoted. He is, though, mentioned twice on the same page but mediated through a quotation of an opinion of A. D. Nuttall’s. Then there is the question of definition, both of experience and religious experience. Dubois refers only once, and glancingly, to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), surely a key text for Dubois’s topic. He adduces Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises in order to insist on the fact that the personal spiritual experience of a Catholic needs to be considered within the framework of Catholicism. In this respect, one might interpret even Hopkins’s late poems as grounded in the ecclesial community through the first-person-plural pronoun, often falling at the end of the poems, as witness “Patience, hard thing” and “To R.B.” But it is worth remembering that Hopkins’s superiors were rarely comfortable with his poetry and that the Month twice refused his poetry. If the “Terrible Sonnets” are a record of spiritual experience, to what process of spiritual direction and discernment did Hopkins subject them in dialogue with his Company? “Hopkins’s poetry always has a theological and ecclesiastical discipline,” Dubois writes, a little sweepingly. How do we apply this statement (“always”) to, say, “What Shall I Do for the Land that Bred Me?”? What would Hopkins’s superiors have made (or what did they make) of a poem such as “Epithalamium”?

One of the interesting things about the word “experience” is its ability to take a complement or not. Hence Dubois has, for example, both “ordinary and everyday experience” (p. 75), the wording here being profane, and “the experience of individual being” (p. 104)—also profane, if philosophical in tenor. Is the writing and reading of poetry itself a—potential—form of religious experience...