This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

This chapter proposes that Hopkins’s poems are distinctive in being actively and vividly addressed – to their subjects, to the imagined reader, and to God – or, at times, in staging forms of address that seem to have gone awry. The suggestion is that Hopkins makes poetic address morally vital; its turns and complexities map social, moral, and theological terrain.

This chapter considers the syntax of Hopkins’s poems. It places Hopkins’s syntax in the context of his devotional and artistic life, showing how his sentences negotiate the conflicting pressures exerted by Catholic faith and poetic ambition, personal idiosyncrasy, and the desire to be ‘intelligible’. It also places the poems in the context of larger syntactical trends, showing how Hopkins’s phrasing works with and against the grain of nineteenth-century usage, and addressing Hopkins’s interest in and anticipation of developments in Victorian philology. The chapter pays particular attention to ‘Myself Unholy’, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’.

Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

This chapter explores the ways in which Hopkins was deliberately and accidentally in proximity to key sites of Victorian industrial progress throughout his life and career. It considers also his interest in the interplay and tension between nature and the industrial environment. This, the chapter proposes, is evident as much in the forms and structures of his poetry as in its content.

In Hopkins’s writing, eroticism centres on eros or amor and loving the body of Christ. In the framework of Hopkins’s spiritual eroticism, eros or amor is love. Understanding the significance of love and the body in Hopkins’s writings – his poems, sermons, spiritual writings, diaries, essays, and letters – allows us to come to a fuller understanding of his relationship with Christ. Hopkins’s vow of celibacy afforded him the freedom to express his passion for Christ through romantic and sexual tropes such as touching hands, melting and merging subjects, beating hearts, magnetic attraction, mutual gazes, kisses, embraces, fecundity, and homecoming. We shall look at some of these tropes in this chapter, many of which can be traced back to ancient Greece and the early church fathers. Ultimately, Hopkins wrote about erotic desires and tactile pleasures in a manner that was broad and expansive.

This chapter explores Hopkins’s responses to the environmental degradation he witnessed in the 1870s and 1880s – from the time of his earliest professional assignments in the industrial north to his final years in Dublin – when the destructive effects of manufacturing industry, mechanization, and urban expansion were becoming increasingly apparent. Drawing on select poems, journals, and letters especially those to his family and friends when he relocates and describes his new surroundings, the chapter compares his views to those of his contemporaries such as John Ruskin and the industrial ‘Lanarkshire poets’ near Glasgow, Scotland. It focuses particularly on the pollution of air and water by mines and mills, and the emphasis Hopkins places on the purity of these elements for the well-being of both human and non-human life. It also notes Hopkins’s awareness of the damage done to whole ecosystems in the name of social and economic ‘progress’.

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.

This chapter outlines Hopkins’s knowledge of contemporary energy physics as it decisively shapes his distinctive poetry and the metaphysic that undergirds it. The discussion begins with Hopkins’s appreciation of meteorology in his ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, of the earth’s atmosphere as a vast thermodynamic system. The figure that this poem presents of man as a lonely ‘spark,’ and the pyrotechnics of ‘As kingfishers catch fire,’ ‘The Windhover’ and ‘God’s Grandeur,’ are then glossed through the optical application of the energy concept in spectroscopy. Finally the chapter considers field theory and Clerk Maxwell’s reassessment of the Newtonian principle of force through the energy concept as the distributive principle of stress, tracing Hopkins’s use of this physical concept in his writings on mechanics, nature and most momentously in the definitive formulation of his metaphysic of stress, instress ,and inscape in 1868 and the concurrent advent of his metrical principle of Sprung Rhythm.

This chapter argues that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preoccupation with agony and martyrdom is best understood in the broader context of Victorian figurations of religious suffering as inherently feminine. The chapter outlines the multiple factors shaping Victorian interest in female martyrs, from new theories of sexology to anxieties over Roman Catholicism. It then examines texts by writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, John Mason Neale, and Charles Kingsley that contain representations of suffering as a Christian virtue to which women are innately disposed. Such texts ostensibly frame women’s martyrdom as a paradoxical means of power through self-disavowal while often containing voyeuristic descriptions of suffering female flesh. Next, the work of Christina Rossetti is introduced as a counterpoint that avoids lurid depictions of sexualized violence in favour of reflections on female subjectivity and salvation. The chapter ends by finding in Hopkins’s martyr texts a complex and nonreductive engagement in this wider discourse.

As an undergraduate studying Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1860s, Hopkins found himself at the centre of the Victorian Platonic revival. This essay charts the contours of classical scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century and the outsize role played by Hopkins’s tutor Benjamin Jowett in promoting Presocratic and Platonic philosophy as the necessary foundation of modern thought. This early encounter with ancient Greek thought provided Hopkins with a philosophical framework through which he could prosecute one of his most fundamental intuitions: that reality is complex, and that it is necessary to pay careful attention to the proper relations between the individual and the whole. It was as he studied these early philosophers that Hopkins first formulated his key concepts of inscape and instress and, more importantly, found the prompt for his own self-consciously modern experiments in verse-writing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in Dublin to the post of Professor of Greek at University College Dublin in February 1884. He was thirty-nine. He died of typhoid in his university rooms in June 1889, a month short of his forty-fifth birthday. Never the most prolific of poets, Hopkins wrote about twenty-five completed or near-completed poems in his five and a half years in Ireland, including undoubted masterpieces. Caught between devotion to church and resistance to state, Catholic Ireland was not exactly hostile to the priest who worked there for five years before his death, but its divisiveness immeasurably deepened the pitch and the discomfort of a poetry tugged in two ways, between the desolations of self and the consolations of church and state.

Hopkins’s journals are usually read as source-books for his poems. Their fragmentariness smacks of the archive, seeming to position this material as purely of scholarly interest. These odds and ends are meant, it would seem, to be searched for aperçus, inscapes, what Whitman would call ‘go-befores and embryons’, later immortalized in verse. But it’s also possible to read the journals as literature in their own right: as a great poet’s utmost experiment with the possibilities of prose. Hopkins’s nature descriptions experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. He inherited an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Revealing an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water, Hopkins’s self-conscious sentences illuminate – as well as transcend – Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

This chapter examines the extent to which Hopkins’s poetry was shaped by his knowledge of and engagement with nineteenth-century ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ – that is, the idea that the Anglo-Saxon period played a uniquely important part in the intellectual, cultural, and political formation of the English people. This resulted, amongst other things, in a reassessment of the value of Anglo-Saxon poetry, a sustained attempt to understand its distinctive linguistic devices and alliterative verse forms, and a desire to impart something of its native energy and vigour to contemporary verse. Hopkins appears to have seen some of the idiosyncratic formal and linguistic features of his own poetry as part of this revival; the chapter traces some of the affinities and asymmetries between his work and the contemporary understanding of Anglo-Saxon verse, and concludes by suggesting areas for future research on this topic.

Apart from the myth that he failed his theology exam in the Society of Jesus, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s scholastic training is largely unstudied. This chapter outlines Hopkins’s philosophy course at Roehampton and his theology course at St Beuno’s, identifies his various teachers, and assesses his modest contribution to Catholic theology. Taking into account the ways the Society of Jesus modified and updated its curriculum in the second half of the nineteenth century, it argues that in Hopkins’s day the Society of Jesus was never merely ‘Suárezian’ – even at St Beuno’s – but rather diverse and at times even genuinely creative.

This chapter shows how Hopkins’s letters to his family members, fellow poets, and friends allow readers access to two crucial aspects of the poet’s unusual career. In the first place, we witness the development of those personal relationships that gave him scope for practising and performing his craft; relationships which were both crucial and conflicted for a writer who firmly held religious life to be paramount. In the second instance, these letters feature Hopkins’s clearest explanations of his aesthetic principles, as well as their correlation with his spiritual beliefs.

This assessment of Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, considers the social and physical environments in which he flourished and flailed, the intellectual and cultural opportunities he seized, and the religious conflicts in which he was embroiled. In terms of his undergraduate work, the chapter analyses how the essential elements of the Victorian zeitgeist – historicism and scientism – were a felt presence throughout Hopkins’s essays. In terms of his personal life, Hopkins’s homoeroticism is linked to the negative, self-recriminating ‘selving’ articulated in diary entries and poems. Contexts for his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are also explored.