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Leopold Sédar Senghor was also the occasional translator of several English poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, for whom he always professed intense admiration. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds several first drafts and revised typescripts of his translation of Hopkins’s masterpiece, The Wreck of the Deutschland, so we can see the progress of this challenging work he conceived as “a pleasant pastime”. Our reading of the translation and its drafts reveals a surprising poetic proximity (in terms of topics, rhythm and tropes) between Senghor’s own poetry and his translation of Hopkins, giving rise to two hypotheses: did Senghor impart his own style on the translation (a rather common practice among poet-translators) or does the whole enterprise testify to an unexpected poetic filiation?

Aposiopesis – to figura retoryczna, która jest stosunkowo rzadko przedmiotem zainteresowania badaczy. Artykuł stanowi porównanie dwóch udanych artystycznie oraz interesujących intelektualnie realizacji aposiopesis w poezji języka angielskiego: w poemacie Katastrofa statku „Deutschland” Gerarda Manleya Hopkinsa oraz w wierszu Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour Wallace’a Stevensa.Wnawiązaniu do syntezy Heinricha Lausberga charakter aposiopesis w tych dwóch dziełach dookreślono poprzez ukazanie konfliktu pomiędzy treścią pominiętej wypowiedzi a siłą powstrzymującą ujawnienie owej treści. Dostrzeżenie różnicy pomiędzy dwiema realizacjami tej samej figury pozwala wskazać na zmianę, która dokonała się w poezji w zakresie sposobów poruszania kwestii religijnych. Tę zmianę określa przejście w „tryb języka”, które jest cechą poezji Stevensa. Zarazem analiza aposiopesis w jego wierszu pozwala zauważyć subtelne przełamanie tego językowego trybu mówienia o kwestiach religijnych.

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.

Vegetal flotsam – undesirable or discarded and dead vegetation – holds and important position in the poetic imagery of Theodore Roethke’s production of the 1930s and ’40. In Roethke’s first two volumes (Open House and The Lost Son and Other Poems), weeds and dead plants are the protagonists of poems that are strikingly different from each other in style and content. “Long Live the Weeds” – Roethke’s “rewriting” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Inversnaid” – expresses a reassuring worldview where “the ugly of the universe” is a necessary and even joyfully welcomed part of the universe’s natural order. In the “Lost Son Narratives” the faith in such idea is cyclically lost and reconquered by the conscience perceiving nature in its concreteness. In the Greenhouse Poems the interaction between the crude and simple representation of uprooted and decomposing plants, in particular poems like “Weed Puller” and “Flower Dump”, and the sequence’s portrayal of the entire vital balance of the greenhouse conveys an even more problematic and open-ended view of nature. As a thorough analysis and comparison of “Long Live the Weeds!” (first published in 1936) and sections the two aforementioned poetic sequences (published in their entirety in 1948) will show, in Roethke’s first two collections, the evolution of his modes of representation of vegetal flotsam mirrors the evolution of his conception of nature and existence.

This essay discusses Gerard Manley Hopkin’s notions of inscape and instress, examining their early expressions during Hopkins’s time as a student at and recent alumnus of Balliol College, Oxford, their subsequent development amid Hopkins’s career as a Jesuit novice and priest, and their manifestation in four sonnets composed in 1877. Attention is paid throughout to the likely influence of Hopkins’s Balliol tutor, Walter Pater, as well as the influence of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises upon Hopkins’s presentation of inscape and instress in his poems.

Contemporary French philosophers such as Levinas, Bataille, and Derrida, along with the existentialists Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have all made use of Franciscan insights in order to safeguard the ipseity that cannot be reduced or totalized. In keeping with the taste that concerns me, this paper will examine Derrida’s turn to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and how such a turn may place Derrida within a catholic and Franciscan tradition.

This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of “things” to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a poem is endangered—crossed between the concrete and the abstract, the perceived and the imagined, the object and the thing. Whereas for Heidegger danger entails a technocratic closure of Dasein’s being-toward-death, for Lacoste danger is proper to the being of life. Lacoste offers two “counter-existentials” to show, contra Heidegger, that life simply cannot be being-toward-death all the time: sabbatical experience and art experience. It is to these kinds of experience that poetry clearly belongs. To illustrate what Lacoste means by sabbatical experience, I offer a reading of G.M. Hopkins’s “Hurrahing in Harvest” (1877); to illustrate what Lacoste means by art experience, I turn to Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). Finally, I conclude that rather than contrast the secular poem with the religious poem it is best to think of all poetry as generically sacramental, i.e., signs and things (signum et res), with religious poetry constituting an excessive pole that is addressed to the sacrament of God (res tantum). The Christian loves the poem because the poem does not make him or her choose between God and things—in light of the Incarnation, an insupportable choice.

Gerard Manley Hopkins himself called The Windhover “the best thing he ever wrote” (Peters, 81). This could be the main motive for adding “To Christ our Lord” under the title six years after the sonnet had been written. The implied ambiguities of “The Windhover,” evoking different kinds of explanation, constitute one of the reasons why it “is probably the most written about short poem in the English language” (Pick, 1). The phrase “To Christ our Lord” accompanying the title was made central to the discussion, as it was believed to form the key ambiguity that utterly influences the meaning of the whole work. This essay concentrates on the line “To Christ our Lord” and on two different approaches to and interpretations of “The Windhover.”