Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience by Martin Dubois (review)

Martin Dubois's Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience is a clear-sighted and necessary study that examines Hopkins's poetry as it springs from, engages with, and negotiates his quotidian religious experience and beliefs, "the promise and difficulty of human striving for God in day-to-day life" (171). While it engages carefully and respectfully with other critics, the book's approach is predicated upon incisive critiques that disclose powerful and pervasive assumptions that have shaped Hopkins studies over the past century. Such analyses not only facilitate the author's own original study, but also prepare the ground for further renewals of the field by other scholars. Biographies of Hopkins have often described a tragic trajectory of increasing alienation, misunderstanding, and neglect, which indeed continued posthumously after his death in 1889. Since the first collection of his poems appeared in 1918, secular literary critics and Roman Catholic commentators alike have focused upon the ostensibly mature poetry of the late 1870s, principally "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (written 1875–76, published 1918) and the nature poems, and countered the entropic unraveling of his strands of being with triumphalist assertions of a transcendent private metaphysic. Such commentaries can appear to parallel the resurrectionary formula of Hopkins's "Felix Randal" (1880) (the awkwardness of which is glossed by this study), in which the sad end is insistently supplanted by, or at least quarantined from, Hopkins in his happy and most authentic prime.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience opens with Hopkins's final poem "To R.B." (written 1889, published 1918). By focusing on individual faith not as transcendence but as difficult temporal experience, this study precipitates the return of the repressed in Hopkins studies, highlighting its guiding assumptions, its residual sentimentalism, by redressing "an imbalance in what we appreciate of [his poetry]" (5). It brings forward and gives due consideration to unjustly neglected and occasionally maligned texts, as well as mobilizes insightful new readings of the canonical poetry. The study accordingly emphasizes Hopkins's asceticism rather than his sacramentalism, his "interest in pain" and in martyrdom (108). It explores the often telling awkwardness of his poetic diction. It documents and discusses the disgust he expresses for what he regards as the misshapen and immoral English poor, his writings on soldiers, his reactionary politics, the awkward expressions of his sexual predilections, and the horrible suffering recorded in the sonnets of desolation. The study also variously complicates, adjusts, and refutes such abiding ideas of Hopkins as the hybrid "priest-poet" and "poet-priest" (7) and a "private poet" (4).

The poet's diction, the main reason for his notorious difficulty, is unapologetically recognized, usefully glossed, and demystified here. So, for instance, there are excellent discussions of his "clotted syntax" (155); the "encumbered expression [and] . . . awkwardnesses" deployed in the sonnet "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" (1888) as it functions "to reveal the unexpectedness of God's mercy" (36); the "farfetchedness of Hopkins's rhyming" (127); and "the aggressive newness of Hopkins's language" (60). Such a range of enlightening arguments allows entrance into his often desperate and difficult diction. The tensions with the prevailing religious cultures in which Hopkins found himself, such as the notorious charges of eccentricity made against some of his sermons, are here deftly and precisely historicized. So, too, is his reading of Duns Scotus, which is found not to be aberrant and singular in the way that Hopkins studies has long assumed it to be. The abiding influence upon the Catholic convert of Anglican and Tractarian registers of religious language, translation, and allusion are also nicely traced and contextualized by the book, and found to inflect poetry he wrote across his adult life. The communal contexts of Hopkins's individual religious experience are brought to the fore in decisive ways here; for instance, the Jesuit scholarly preoccupation with recusant martyrs as it informs and shapes the...