Infinite Storms of Beauty: Hopkins, Dillard, and the Epistemology of Downturn, 1870s/1970s

This essay locates a common habit of mind in the nature writing of Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (composed 1870s). Informed by a vestigially Christian structure of redemption, this "downturn epistemology" finds possibility in art when hope in the real world feels lost; it is usefully seen as a symptom of material crisis. Seen this way, these two writers' much-vaunted ecological qualities read also as ideologies of defeat, and connect the crisis years of early-phase industrialism to neoliberal stagflation in the 1970s. The device of allusion activates this nonlinear model of literary-historical temporality, as citational echo-effects join utterances from discrete moments into an ensemble of thought across time.