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Gerard Manley Hopkins was born
in Essex. In 1863, he entered
Oxford University. There, he
experienced a spiritual crisis
that led him to join the Roman
Catholic Church in 1866. Hopkins
entered the Jesuit order in
1868. He then stopped writing
and burned the manuscripts of
his poems. Hopkins returned
to writing in 1875 after being
encouraged by a Jesuit superior.
He was ordained a priest in
1877. On the suggestion of a
friend that he could write poems
about the nature by appreciating
God’s greatness, Hopkins
started writing such poems;
he felt poems about the beauty
of culture could also be religious
at the same time. He combined
his artistic (and romantic)
interests with his religious
interests and explored both
his faith and love of beauty
in God’s wonderful nature.
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Hopkins once tried to
become a painter, and
that seems to have left
an impact in his poetry.
Hopkins was a romantic
poet till the age of
22, which he was influenced
by a strong religious
reawakening (of ritualistic
Christianity) called
the Oxford Movement.
He became a Catholic
Christian, and later
he became a Jesuit priest
(or, member of the Society
of Jesus). Hopkins ranks
as a major poet of Victorian
England, though his
work remained almost
unknown until 1918,
when it was first published.
Hopkins wrote most of
his poetry in sprung
rhythm, which emphasizes
the natural rhythms
of speech. |
He filled his verse with alliteration
and unusual words of combinations.
His poems, which are especially
effective when read aloud, include
the long and complex “The
Wreck of the Deutschland.”
The poem makes bold use of Hopkins’s
“sprung rhythm”
technique (whereby each foot
has one stressed syllable followed
by a varying number of unstressed),
as do his best-known poems “The
Windhover” and “Pied
Beauty” both written in
1877. His work, collected in
Poems (1918), was published
posthumously by his friend Robert
Bridges.
Hopkins
experiments the new type of
poetry different from his contemporary
Victorian poets. His poetic
practice was in some essential
respects the reverse of Tennyson’s.
Instead of using imagery in
order to achieve an expansion
outward into a generalized mood,
he used it so as to refer continuously
and cumulatively back to the
poem until a total structure
of meaning was contained in
the poem, a meaning that exploded
with immense force once it became
known.
Hopkins’s
endeavor was to achieve the
unique and essential meaning
of the experience he was embodying;
‘inscape’ (i.e.
inner form of nature), the individual
and distinctive design, was
for him the true reality and
the personality of the poem.
His use of sprung rhythm and
emotional pattern is unique.
An almost Anglo-Saxon strength
is given to the verse by the
alliterative beat. His poems
seek to unite passionate appreciation
and dilated awareness of the
beauty of nature with a deep
religious sense of God’s
presence and reality. The recharging
of language, the vitalizing
of rhythms, the counterpointing
of colloquial and formal speech,
the structuring of imagery into
a complex totality of meaning
are the characteristics of his
poetry. The devotional feeling
in mundane human activities
is a significant aspect of Hopkins’s
technique. His poetic aim consists
in trying up of human and divine.
His 'The Windhover' is one of
the most remarkable poems in
the use of imagery.
Hopkins’s
oddities – his elisions,
omission of relative pronouns,
twisted word order, and so on-
are part of his strength and
individuality. He gives new
meaning, new dignity and precision
to worn words. But perhaps his
greatest achievement was in
breaking out to both the Victorian
elegiac mode and of the Wordsworthian
mode of nature poetry to achieve
a fresh and original handling
of personal sorrow and of feeling
for nature. |
