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This intensive study embarks on an in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between Transcendentalist philosophy and the timeless poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This study aims to shed light on the strong relationship between Hopkins' literary work and the fundamental perceptions of Transcendentalist ideology by evaluating two of his most significant and symbolic poems - The Starlight Night, and Spring. Through a careful examination of themes such as nature, individual experience, and spiritual revelation as depicted in Hopkins' poetry, this study unveils insightful parallels with the core ideals adopted by Transcendentalist thinkers. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of Hopkins' poetic vision within the context of Transcendentalist thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

G. K. Chesterton, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are set in conversation with Pope Francis's Laudato Si' (2015), to show how far those writers anticipate its animus against technocratic capitalism, but also, more surprisingly, how far Laudato Si' challenges the progressive assumptions of contemporary eco-activism. Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins do not merely foreshadow and clarify the theological stakes of a papal document. By making even single words expressive of a whole worldview (achieving what William Empson called a 'compacted doctrine'), their writings prove more imaginatively affective, as well as more theologically adequate than the communicative formalities available to the theological treatise as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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By profession, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Classicist. From his novitiate to his death, he taught Greek and Latin at Jesuit schools in England, then at University College Dublin. Remarks in his journals and letters make clear his deep and lifelong engagement with Classics, and the influence of classical literature, particularly the work of Pindar and the Pre-Socratic philosophers, on his English poetry has been observed by numerous critics. Subject to less attention are the poems Hopkins composed in Latin, which include verse composition and translations from English. This article considers one such poem, an original Latin elegy composed in 1867, and explores its language, imagery, literary influences, and possible interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches to literary study, this essay argues that the nineteenth-century discourse of the Gulf Stream included a significant aesthetic dimension organized by a dialectic between stability and variability. First, the essay traces the Gulf Stream’s presence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific writing and print culture, showing how memorable figures and vivid illustrations accentuated the risk of climate variability even as they charted an apparently stable oceanic system. Next, it considers the work of two poets separated by the ocean, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sidney Lanier. While ostensibly using the Gulf Stream motif to reflect on geographic identity and cultural belonging, Hopkins and Lanier use formal and figurative techniques that register the threat of climate instability, offering a deeper sense of climate disquiet than the scientific materials on which they drew. Finally, the essay looks at the poetry of Derek Walcott, sketching the afterlife of the Gulf Stream discourse, extending its formal and figurative lineage, and renewing the present ecological urgency of thinking with an Earth-system process as a motif of climatic connection and obligation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, the swing of anthropocentric forces wrought profoundly deleterious changes upon the face of the natural environment. Witnessing these metamorphic processes at work was Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose unique sensibility found the despoilment of nature by human hand no less than extremely dispiriting. Against a backdrop of the vanishing beauty, Hopkins fervidly engaged with the transforming world in his ecopoetical ruminations. He was not the first poet of ecological dissent, for during the Romantic period John Clare had poignantly expressed the anguish at what had then been the incipient stages of nature being disrobed of its inherent singularity. Being quite familiar with Clare’s ecopoetical meditations, the Jesuit poet was able to further elaborate upon Clare’s vision, while proving successful in presciently observing the discrepancies between wilderness as a cultural construct and a wildness whose emphasis upon the appreciation of the global through the local corresponds closely to the present-day awareness concerning the fragility of ecosystems. Most vividly and extensively, Hopkins explores the dyad of wildness and wilderness in poems like “Inversnaid,” “Duns Scotus’ Oxford,” and “Binsey Poplars,” wherein he truly establishes himself as one of the essential forerunners of modern ecological science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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When placing Hopkins in the divisive and impassioned religious and academic world of mid-Victorian Oxford, scholars have frequently drawn attention to those University tutors and senior churchmen who in different ways influenced his mental and religious development: Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, Henry Parry Liddon, and (more distantly, from Birmingham) John Henry Newman. In comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to Hopkins’s own undergraduate friends and contemporaries at Balliol College, or to the question of how other young men responded to the same set of religious circumstances and intellectual influences. In this study Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) is selected to illustrate discernible Anglican parallels to particular aspects of Hopkins’s literary style and religious faith. Examining the ways Holland’s Anglicanism resembles, engages, contests, and shadows the early spirituality of Hopkins throws useful light on their overlapping academic and religious contexts. Particular attention is paid to examples of shared vocabulary, to themes from Holland’s published sermons and religious writings, which correlate to elements of Hopkins’s work, and especially to Holland’s vision of a kenotic “law of sacrifice” set in the life of the Holy Trinity. Key works such as Holland’s Logic and Life (1882) and the influential volume of Anglican essays Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1889) are utilized to inform a new perspective on Hopkins’s sermons and devotional writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a re-reading of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins from the perspective of Heideggerian ecophilosophy. It presents Hopkins's dynamic concept of reality, key principles of his sacramental poetics and his concern for the gradual destruction of the environment. The Hopkinsean concept of the sacred core of reality is discussed and interpreted in the context of Heideggerian environmental criticism. The conclusion sums up the main tenets of Hopkins's vision of the natural world and attempts to show how this vision may inform our environmental awareness even in a non-religious or multi-religious age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars" from an incarnational theological lens. Such a reading negotiates seemingly incongruent arguments put forth by Post, who argues that Hopkins's ecological world is "other," and Day, who argues that Hopkins makes the ecological world comprehensible. Incarnational theology allows for a middle ground by preserving beings' uniqueness yet unifying them in a collective body. Additionally, reading the poem from an incarnational theological lens continues recent critical work that sees religious dimensions in the poem. Finally, this essay suggests that Hopkins's incarnational theology anticipates and speaks to contemporary ecological and ecocritical issues. As such, this essay reads contemporary and emerging ecocritical voices alongside Hopkins's poem to demonstrate the harmony between the theological and theoretical voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses how Hopkins’s concept of inscape interacts with issues of perception in 19th-century scientific discourse. In particular, I address the problem of attention, a tool deemed essential for scientists during this period. Attention can be defined as an act of will toward an object of perception that will overcome subjective conclusions and produce more reliable objective knowledge. In this essay, I consider how attention influenced the development of Hopkins’s inscape and demonstrate how four poems, “The Candle Indoors,” “The Lantern Out of Doors,” and the sonnets “The Windhover” and “As kingfishers catch fire,” attempt to solve the problems of sustaining attention to achieve reliable knowledge about both the physical and the metaphysical reality contained within God’s creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Diaries (1862–66) and Journals (1866–75) have received relatively little critical attention. They are studied principally as a means to more fully understanding the poetry. In fact, Hopkins was working out his ideas in prose concerning the proper place of art and beauty in religious life long before he expressed that conviction in the sonnets that he composed in Wales in 1877. The Diaries and Journals articulate what is conventionally attributed only to the poems: that in perceiving nature so intensely, sensuously, and deeply, he was discovering the sacramental presence of God in Creation. As we study Hopkins’s poetry, the Diaries and Journals must be acknowledged, not as mere shadows of the poems to come but as prior evidence of his spiritually charged perceptual processes, and his command of the powers of language to express his mystical experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might epiphany mean for a 'secular' society? What does it mean after the death of God? This article explores the hermeneutics of immanent, planetary epiphanies in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the creative spaces between author, text, and reader new possibilities for becoming enter the world. As such we might be able to name these anatheistic epiphanies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins already demonstrated a special sensitivity to nature as a young Anglican. But his conversion to Catholicism, followed by his formation as a Jesuit, nurtured a creation spirituality that moved him from the rather cold view of the cosmos typical of his Victorian era to a vibrant sense of God intimately revealed in nature. This new sense of being a creature involved in an intimate personal relationship with the Creator comes from Hopkins' appropriation of the creation spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola. After reviewing the evolution of worldviews from the medieval synthesis melded with the Newtonian mechanical model (the Victorian picture) to our contemporary cosmic "story," this article then samples poems that illustrate the creation spirituality that Hopkins absorbed from Ignatius' vision. This vision is remarkably in tune with the new sense of the place of the human creature in the cosmic story that the sciences now tell regarding the emergence of matter, life, and persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between poetry and mathematics in nineteenth-century thought, particularly in relation to the notion of the world as a text, utterance, program, or formula created by God. In the works of writers and mathematicians as diverse as Coleridge, Hopkins, Lovelace, and Babbage, poetry and mathematics are frequently conceptualized in terms of one another, or envisaged as unified in the context of the world as Divine Logos. Furthermore, the idea of the world as a text or formula which theoretically could be deciphered often translates into an ambition to incarnate language or mathematics into reality itself through providing a 'uniting link' (Lovelace) between the material and symbolic worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A culturally nuanced translation of archaic Greek verbal culture can only be achieved with reference to the original audience. In Bacchylides 17 ('Theseus' Dive'), the fifth-century poet's compound epithets operate entirely within an epic-lyric tradition, in contrast to the fourth-century verbal innovation of Timotheus. Poetry in the English language has always followed Timotheus more than Bacchylides, reaching a climax in the theory of 'inscape' and expressive epithets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a classicist, Hopkins was intimately familiar with Greek poetic diction, and his notebooks record that he interpreted the Iliad's traditional epithets contextually and not merely lexically. Analogically, we may imagine Greek audiences as projecting their own personal contexts and experience into the interpretation of the traditional compound epithets of Bacchylides 17. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins may have been the ideal theologian for Emily Brontë, as inscape, Hopkins's most famous contribution to the English language, is an apt description not only for the ferocious love between Cathy and Heathcliff, but also for the compassion that God would have felt for the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. My purpose in this paper is to indicate how Emily Brontë's portrayal of a violent, passionate world lends itself to an interpretation of an abiding divine presence as seen from a Hopkinsian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seamus Heaney has reiterated the importance of Gerard Manley Hopkins in shaping his own poetic voice. This essay studies the way Hopkins's and Heaney's poetics are related to their Catholic formation. While their sacramental approaches to language and their ideas of grace and self-discipline result in similar linguistic and formal features in their poems, the two poets' different understandings of the temporality of the world/Word also gives rise to the contrast between Hopkins's poetic rendering of dynamic, variegated existence and Heaney's vision of a realm of “verbless” purity. Based on an understanding of the world as ever-occurring Incarnation, Hopkins's poems often foreground a dialogic, transgressive element, trying to capture the vivifying principle of the Word, whereas Heaney's anxiety to override the contingencies of time gradually lures him to a visionary space where time is momentarily suspended and actions frozen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]