Hopeful Hopkins: Essays by Desmond Egan (review)

On 18 February 1884, Gerard Manley Hopkins moved to Dublin to assume the positions of Professor of Classics at University College and Fellow of the Royal University of Dublin. Although Hopkins was "warmly welcomed and most kindly treated" upon his arrival, he found Dublin "a joyless place."¹ Dislocated from his homeland, his Jesuit province, his friends, and his family, Hopkins found himself a "stranger," as he would write in one of his "sonnets of desolation,"² stuck "at a third/Remove."³ His middle-to-upper-class English accent (cultivated in Hampstead and Oxford), his frail body, his sensitivity, and his reputation as a "detached aesthete" and an "eccentric" pitted him as an outsider among the largely working class and politically charged Irish.⁴ His feelings of isolation were only made worse by bouts of ill-health, "jaded[ness]," and the "severe work" of marking examination papers and delivering lectures (Correspondence 690).

The image of a sickly and depressed Jesuit poet, wasting away in a decrepit Dublin, has become the dominant representation of Hopkins in his final years. In a description of Norman White's book Hopkins in Ireland on the University College Dublin Press website, a commentator went so far as to say that Hopkins was "a sick and self-lacerating human being."⁵ Yet is such a representation accurate? Did Hopkins not have another side to him during those years? Desmond Egan's new collection of essays, Hopeful Hopkins: Essays, emphatically confirms the existence of the "other, more characteristic side[s]" of Hopkins's personality (31): his unwavering belief, his humor, his faith in poetic language, his energy, and his hopefulness. With an acute sympathy for Hopkins's belief in Christianity and the "sacred function of poetry" (19), Egan makes a successful gesture at uncovering Hopkins's complex and paradoxical personality and, in turn, at bringing his late poems into their proper frame of emotional, linguistic, and thematic reference.

In the opening essay of Hopeful Hopkins, Egan makes his most extended defense of the collection's thesis. Why, he inquires, have writers like John Keats, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, and Samuel Beckett—all melancholic in their temperaments—not suffered the same fate as Hopkins? Why has only Hopkins been considered "essentially" depressed (17)? While Egan acknowledges Hopkins's physical and mental sensitivity, in Dublin and elsewhere, he believes that the "gloom-gang" as he calls those commentators who have labeled Hopkins a "neurotic" and "depressive," have failed to consider the poet in light of his beliefs and accomplishments (20). During his years in Dublin, for one, Hopkins produced almost one-third of his poetic output, engaged in musical composition, sketched, and undertook a number of scholarly projects (including a book on Greek meter and various contributions to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary⁶), and he labored over his work as a professor and a fellow. He also put a similar sort of energy into his correspondences and relationships. In a letter to his sister, which begins "Im intoirely ashamed o meself," for example, Hopkins mimics the Hiberno-English spoken in Dublin with an intelligence and wit that reveals his willingness to be both intimate and playful (26, 58-59, Correspondence 701-02).

Egan argues that Hopkins's productivity and humor are indicative of a "positive disposition" that not only resists the terms of "depression" and "despair," but are also "related to belief in a Superior Being" (19, 28). At the heart of Egan's argument is a conviction that Hopkins's commentators have not been properly sympathetic to him in terms of his faith. If they had been, they would know that Christianity accepts a certain paradoxical understanding of the relationship between denial and affirmation, despair and hope. Spiritual, mental, and physical suffering, Egan insists, can, in fact, be redemptive or "conducive to holiness" (20). Hopkins certainly would have felt this to be true. In his spiritual notebook, he writes, "Man was created to praise … and the other things on earth— … weakness, ill health...