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“What is sound?” This question is asked by the plural poetizing subject in the third line of “The Silver Jubilee” (1876). Its scope should not be reduced, minimized, or neglected, since it questions coeval public and institutional sonic experience and culture, which Hopkins collectively literarizes in this poem in two complementary ways, both man-oriented, artificial, and eventually ineffectual: 1. on the one hand, “high-hung bells” (l. 1), whose “allusion” implies a reference “to the great cathedrals, non longer Catholic” (N. H. MacLenzie, A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philadelphia, Saint Joseph’s University Press, 20082, p. 48); 2. on the other hand, “braggart bugles” (l. 2), whose sonic manifestation evokes the codes of “military signalling” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “bugle, n. 2”). The definition of the latter as “din” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “din, n.1a”: “a loud noise; particularly a continued confused or resonant sound, which stuns or distresses the ear”) is highly relevant here, since it is included within a wider category of “sound” that does not fit in with the commonplace twentieth-century opposition between sound and noise. In “The Silver Jubilee”, however, both “bells” and “bugles” (with their metallic alloys, musical languages, and anthropocentric soundscapes) are relativized – though not marginalized or erased - by a more comprehensive and universal sonic environment, “Nature’s round” (l. 3), that counterpoints with them from a more strategic position and that will re-emerge again in Hopkins’s poetry, e.g., in a fulminating line of a later poem, “Repeat that, repeat” (1879?): “the whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound” (l. 5). This essay examines this counterpointing relationship to show how it contributes to Hopkins’s conception of reality as “pied beauty”.

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.

Norman White has written in his Literary Biography that, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the second half of 1865” was a period in which his “old self was repudiated, but he had not yet knitted together the valuable pieces of his past” . Such difficulties or – making the best of Hopkins’s imminent conversion to Catholicism in 1866 – as-yet-unfulfilled potentialities in self-knitting or self-coalescence find correspondence and representation in “the octave of an unfinished sonnet” on Shakspere , whose autograph manuscript dates back to 13 September 1865. Hopkins’s Shakspere and its idiosyncratic textual, literary and cultural features have been only scantily investigated by the so-called “Hopkins industry”.

Esce in Italia una nuova antologia del poeta

As a phenomenon, awe is not reducible to any combination of distinct elements such as wonder, fear or reverence, but combines all of these together with surprise or even anguish. The metaphors with which awe can be described therefore never fully define what it feels like to be affected by awe: awe is motion, elevation, lightness, and flight. As experience, awe constitutes a shattering jolt that brings about a fundamental and revelatory re-conception of life: a full awareness of the invisible life, filled, "in a flash", to the brim. This study explores awe’s coming to poetical givenness in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins by taking into consideration experiential and existential as well as epistemological concerns. A phenomenological approach, for instance Edmund Husserl’s epochetic method and Michel Henry’s concept of the invisible, helps illuminate Hopkins’s poetics; a poetics which solicits a special focus precisely on awe in its various aspects. Hopkins’s poetry has a unique ability to constitute a crossing where in-depth feelings and forces of the wondrous in the striking aspects of awe can be vocalised. The focus on the phenomenon of awe’s poetical appearing therefore allows for a consideration of this life-transforming jolt as an irresistible force reverberating throughout Hopkins’s work and as such allows us to explore the experience of invisible life that lies at the heart of the possibility of conversion as a fundamental change of world-view.

Il poeta vittoriano Gerard Manley Hopkins e il Natale

Il poeta vittoriano Gerard Manley Hopkins e il Natale

Gerard Manley Hopkins's reception and intrerpretation of William Shakespeare's thought and work