Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844-1889 from Literature Online biography
Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright ㄏ 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved.
Gerard Manley Hopkins , priest, Professor of Classics and poet, was born into a high Anglican family of considerable talents in Stratford in Essex on 28 July 1844. His father, Manley Hopkins, worked as a marine adjuster, but he also wrote poetry, songs and a novel along with shipping manuals. He collaborated with his son Gerard on a mathematical work based on his professional interest in probability. Hopkins's mother spoke Italian and German and played music, one of his sisters became a musician, and two of his brothers were artists. Gerard excelled academically at Highgate School, where he received an education solidly grounded in the Classics, while showing significant promise as an artist, coming under what were to be the enduring influences of the pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin .
In 1863 Hopkins won an exhibition to Balliol College in Oxford, where his Classics tutor was Benjamin Jowett, one of the leading theological controversialists in an Oxford still feeling the repercussions of the Oxford Movement which had caused such division in the English Church for thirty years. Jowett, in opposition to the Anglo-Catholic leanings of Oxford scholars like John Keble , John Henry Newman , Edward Pusey, and Hopkins himself, was a theological liberal. Yet Jowett's intellectual influence, along with the agnostic influence of Hopkins's other tutors, T.H. Green and Walter Pater , was great on the idiosyncratic poetics that Hopkins was beginning to develop. In addition to being academically excellent and remarkably devout, Hopkins wrote much poetry while an undergraduate, greatly influenced by Ruskin and Pater . Hopkins joined his classical training to a late-Romantic gospel of nature and art, so that both in the apprentice poetry and the journals that he kept, a faithfulness to minute particularities of detail leads to a conception of Nature which embodies religious significance.
The young Hopkins was troubled by these competing intellectual influences, not only personally but conceptually and politically. The great theological schisms of the Victorian Anglican church were mirrored in the social divisiveness of Victorian Britain as a whole, and the naturally conservative Hopkins was attracted to the solution offered by the most famous of the anti-liberal voices of the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman . In 1866, Hopkins wrote to Newman and asked if he would receive him into the Catholic Church. On 21 October, he converted. This event was to change more than Hopkins's religious life. He could no longer pursue a conventional academic career, since he had now committed heresy in the eyes of Anglican Oxford, and he moved to Birmingham to work as a teacher in Newman 's Oratory school. This was to be the first of many occasions in which Hopkins found himself increasingly estranged (in Wales, Liverpool, and eventually Ireland) from the centre of an establishment in which his considerable academic brilliance might be expected to shine.
In 1868 Hopkins took one more step away from the culture of his youth when he joined the Society of Jesus to follow a vocation to be a priest. Jesuit training is famously rigorous, and Hopkins gave up writing poetry when he began his studies. At this time, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, which all Jesuits follow, were to have a profound influence on his artistic as well as theological habits, and some of Hopkins's most remarkable devotional writing comes from his periods spent contemplating them. These Exercises aim to encourage habits of reflection which force the subject to meditate on spiritual and natural truths with great rigour, something that would not have been alien to the novice who had trained his habits of observation from his reading of Ruskin .
Throughout his period of training, while he stated that he had burnt his verses, and was not to write again for seven years, Hopkins said that he continued to hear in his ear 'the echo of a new rhythm'. In fact, in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges , Hopkins includes a version of a poem re-written in this rhythm. In 1864, Hopkins had composed a dialogue based on the martyrdom of St Dorothea. In 1868 he rewrote it thus: I bear a basket lined with grass. I` am so light and fair` Men are amazed to see me pass With` the basket I bear`, Which in newly drawn green litter Carries treats of sweets for bitter By adding stress marks and accents, thinning out the punctuation and introducing an effect of internal rhyme, the second version of the poem has been re-written in 'sprung rhythm'. The dominant metrical pattern of English verse from the Renaissance to the Victorian period is accentual-syllabic, neither the quantitative metre of classical poetry nor that of Old English stress poetry. Hopkins restores elements of the stress rhythms of medieval English, with which Shakespeare (as in 'Full Fathom Five'), Milton (the choruses to Samson Agonistes ) and Coleridge ( Christabel ) had experimented before, and adds to them the rhythms of the choruses of Greek tragedy and those of ballad, nursery rhyme or hymn, such as he would have heard in the Romantic poets and in Christina Rossetti . Rather than simply counting the metre of a line in terms of feet, with a fixed number of syllables, sprung rhythm emphasises the occurrences of accent, or stress, and its interplay or counterpoint with conventional metre.The line of poetry may appear to be highly irregular, but it is patterned now by stress, emphasising both its individuality and its replication of a 'natural' speaking voice. In the St Dorothea poem, the reading voice is asked to place unexpected stresses on the lines 'I` am so light and fair`' and 'With` the basket I bear`'. This contrasts with the comparatively conventional iambs which conclude the line, 'Men are amazed to see me pass', and is then pointed up with the internally rhyming 'treats of sweets for bitter'. Even in this early experiment, the effect is of a rhythmic pattern suggested and then withdrawn, of a consistent sense of musical surprise being literally sprung on the reader.
Implicit within Hopkins's new conception of sprung rhythm is an attention to the individuality not only of the line of poetry but also of the objects which that line seeks to represent. As throughout his work, this artistic matter matches important theological concerns for Hopkins. The post-medieval theology of the Roman Catholic Church has its basis in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, a philosophy which brings together the teachings of Christ with the classical philosophical tradition. By the late nineteenth century, much of the thought of Hopkins's Oxford was caught between the positivism of science and an idealism in which it was increasingly implicit that the primacy of the subject as a perceiving self was won at the expense of an unknowable world of objects. In the face of such scepticism, that we can never know truths about the world, Hopkins's acquaintance with another medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, enabled him to find an aesthetic which would allow him to reconcile Thomist notions of ideas of essence and appearance with his belief that through the appearance of things we can know the real. Hopkins developed the term 'inscape' for the essence or haecceitas , the 'thisness' of the object. And for appearance, Hopkins developed the idea of 'instress', an active, vital power by which the perceived object forces its inscape on our perception. This instress is the power that the artist must seek to recreate, thus impressing on the audience the personality or inscape of the soul of the object represented. The conclusion to the truncated sonnet 'Pied Beauty', which is part prayer, part declaration of faith, affirms this: All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. This is a world of change and infinite variety, the gift of an Absolute who exists without change. The contrasts, freshness, strangeness, unrepeatable patterning of the perceived things of the world, are caught by the self of the poet and represented in a poetry which attempts to be just as various in itself.
One of the great dangers of such a celebration of individuality is the courting of difference, leading to the conflict that Hopkins's religious vocation might have been designed to foreclose. Another danger is of becoming overwhelmed by the perception of detail to the extent of obscurity. When Hopkins returned to poetry, in 1875-76, he wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland in sprung rhythm, delivering almost fully formed his new poetry and the considerable personal, theological and political concerns with which he had been struggling throughout his years of education, conversion and vocation. It is Hopkins's first major work, not written until he was 31, composed at the prompting of the editor of The Month and then rejected on the grounds of unreadability. In terms of its subject matter, it is certainly still a work of extraordinary difficulty, moving from the personal (the history of Hopkins's own faith and vocation) to a public event (the poem is ostensibly an elegy for five German nuns who drowned while fleeing religious persecution) and finishing with the controversial (it envisages the re-conversion of England to Catholicism). Its poetic form, too, is extremely ambitious, in thirty-five eight-line stanzas, which are frequently marked with stresses which demand the closest concentration on its endlessly surprising metrical effects and semantic punning. The literary and philosophical problems with which it deals, of evil, unnecessary death and eventual consolation, are all presented with a natural imagery and symbolism written in the hard accents of an English language performing at the limits of a vigorous and highly stressed experience. Hopkins succumbed to the protestation of his friends about the difficulty of his new verse and added an 'Author's Preface' for their assistance. Whatever this slight compromise, the initial failure of The Wreck of the Deutschland meant that it remained, along with the rest of Hopkins's poetry, unpublished in his lifetime.
Hopkins now felt that he could resume writing poetry in earnest, although he was never to attempt such a large project again. The dominant form of the rest of his career is the sonnet, a form which he was to make his own, but there were many experiments with sprung rhythm which produced a number of fascinating lyrics on the subjects of nature, martyrdom and chance. Initially, the poetry of Hopkins's return to writing is devotional, and in his poetry of the late 1870s, in sonnets like 'God's Grandeur', 'As kingfishers catch fire', 'Spring', 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty', or longer poems like 'Binsey Poplars', he writes of a nature 'charged with the grandeur of God'. Like William Wordsworth before him, Hopkins finds proofs of the existence of God in nature, yet doesn't follow Wordsworth into pantheism: the beauty of the natural world exists as powerful evidence of a Creator who allows its sensual delights to impress their inscape upon man. When, in 'Binsey Poplars', man is shown destroying nature, then Hopkins merges what would now be known as environmental concerns with a devotional reverence for the created world.
Throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, Hopkins found himself posted around Britain into various academic or parish jobs. His sermons and letters of this period, particularly those from his time in Liverpool and Glasgow, show a priest much shocked by the conditions in which his poor, often immigrant, parishioners lived, and suggest a growing concern with the state of what he calls a 'commonweal' or earthly kingdom in which poverty and unemployment were rife. A later poem, 'Tom's Garland', addresses the waste of the unemployed and those who seem to have no place in society, a state Hopkins contrasted with the vigorous labour of its companion poem, 'Harry Ploughman'. This growing social concern was to be clarified in the last move of Hopkins's life, in 1884, to the post of Professor of Greek and Latin Literature at University College Dublin.
Hopkins's arrival in Dublin was accompanied by controversy, given that he was an Englishman taking up an Irish job, echoing the row which surrounded John Henry Newman 's difficulties in setting up a Catholic University in the 1850s. The poetry which he now began to write also reflects this sense of estrangement and alienation from a society in which he was never entirely welcome, along with a sense of spiritual unease which matched his increasing depression and ill health. The so-called 'terrible sonnets' or 'sonnets of desolation' come from this period, in which Hopkins writes about moments of crisis and division rather than the vital celebration of distinctiveness and difference which had marked his earlier work. His rhythms are now adapted to this new subject matter, often straining to conflict and obscurity, as in 'Spelt from Sybil's Leaves' or 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'. Such last poems push his irregular sonnet forms as far as they can go, writing about an isolated self striving to seek unity of expression and belief, yet often caught on 'a rack / Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ( thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.' Hopkins was not to survive these experiences, and on 8 June 1889 he died of typhoid, aged forty-four.
While Hopkins never published any substantial scholarly work, he corresponded throughout his career with a number of English friends who were critics and artists, and this correspondence amounts to an extraordinary body of literary criticism on English poetry and classical literature. One of these friends, later Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges , collected Hopkins's manuscripts and, in 1918, finally published them. The impact on a modernist British and American poetry, which was now receptive to innovation and experiment, was practically immediate, and continued throughout the twentieth century. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), F.R. Leavis placed Hopkins along with Eliot and Pound at the centre of his account of modern poetry. Intense scholarly interest proceeded, and more of his poems, along with the letters, journals and devotional writings, were published during the 1930s and 1940s. W.H. Gardner re-edited the poems and produced a classic account of the poetry in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy (1944-49). The standard biography is Norman White's Hopkins: A Literary Biography (1992). Contemporary critical studies of Hopkins in books such as Walter Ong's Hopkins, the Self and God (1986), Eric Griffiths's The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), John Schad's Victorians in Theory (1999) and Matthew Campbell's Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) have read Hopkins's work in terms of his metrical, theological and theoretical innovation. Isobel Armstrong in Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1982) and Daniel Brown in Hopkins' Idealism (1997) have emphasised the centrality of his thought to late-Victorian debates over Hegelian idealism and science. More recent accounts of gender and sexuality in the circle of Hopkins and his Catholic contemporaries, such as David Alderson's Mansex Fine (1998), suggest that the most innovative English poet of the nineteenth century will continue to stimulate new critical accounts.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844-1889 from Literature Online biography
Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright ㄏ 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved.
Gerard Manley Hopkins , priest, Professor of Classics and poet, was born into a high Anglican family of considerable talents in Stratford in Essex on 28 July 1844. His father, Manley Hopkins, worked as a marine adjuster, but he also wrote poetry, songs and a novel along with shipping manuals. He collaborated with his son Gerard on a mathematical work based on his professional interest in probability. Hopkins's mother spoke Italian and German and played music, one of his sisters became a musician, and two of his brothers were artists. Gerard excelled academically at Highgate School, where he received an education solidly grounded in the Classics, while showing significant promise as an artist, coming under what were to be the enduring influences of the pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin .
In 1863 Hopkins won an exhibition to Balliol College in Oxford, where his Classics tutor was Benjamin Jowett, one of the leading theological controversialists in an Oxford still feeling the repercussions of the Oxford Movement which had caused such division in the English Church for thirty years. Jowett, in opposition to the Anglo-Catholic leanings of Oxford scholars like John Keble , John Henry Newman , Edward Pusey, and Hopkins himself, was a theological liberal. Yet Jowett's intellectual influence, along with the agnostic influence of Hopkins's other tutors, T.H. Green and Walter Pater , was great on the idiosyncratic poetics that Hopkins was beginning to develop. In addition to being academically excellent and remarkably devout, Hopkins wrote much poetry while an undergraduate, greatly influenced by Ruskin and Pater . Hopkins joined his classical training to a late-Romantic gospel of nature and art, so that both in the apprentice poetry and the journals that he kept, a faithfulness to minute particularities of detail leads to a conception of Nature which embodies religious significance.
The young Hopkins was troubled by these competing intellectual influences, not only personally but conceptually and politically. The great theological schisms of the Victorian Anglican church were mirrored in the social divisiveness of Victorian Britain as a whole, and the naturally conservative Hopkins was attracted to the solution offered by the most famous of the anti-liberal voices of the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman . In 1866, Hopkins wrote to Newman and asked if he would receive him into the Catholic Church. On 21 October, he converted. This event was to change more than Hopkins's religious life. He could no longer pursue a conventional academic career, since he had now committed heresy in the eyes of Anglican Oxford, and he moved to Birmingham to work as a teacher in Newman 's Oratory school. This was to be the first of many occasions in which Hopkins found himself increasingly estranged (in Wales, Liverpool, and eventually Ireland) from the centre of an establishment in which his considerable academic brilliance might be expected to shine.
In 1868 Hopkins took one more step away from the culture of his youth when he joined the Society of Jesus to follow a vocation to be a priest. Jesuit training is famously rigorous, and Hopkins gave up writing poetry when he began his studies. At this time, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, which all Jesuits follow, were to have a profound influence on his artistic as well as theological habits, and some of Hopkins's most remarkable devotional writing comes from his periods spent contemplating them. These Exercises aim to encourage habits of reflection which force the subject to meditate on spiritual and natural truths with great rigour, something that would not have been alien to the novice who had trained his habits of observation from his reading of Ruskin .
Throughout his period of training, while he stated that he had burnt his verses, and was not to write again for seven years, Hopkins said that he continued to hear in his ear 'the echo of a new rhythm'. In fact, in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges , Hopkins includes a version of a poem re-written in this rhythm. In 1864, Hopkins had composed a dialogue based on the martyrdom of St Dorothea. In 1868 he rewrote it thus: I bear a basket lined with grass. I` am so light and fair` Men are amazed to see me pass With` the basket I bear`, Which in newly drawn green litter Carries treats of sweets for bitter By adding stress marks and accents, thinning out the punctuation and introducing an effect of internal rhyme, the second version of the poem has been re-written in 'sprung rhythm'. The dominant metrical pattern of English verse from the Renaissance to the Victorian period is accentual-syllabic, neither the quantitative metre of classical poetry nor that of Old English stress poetry. Hopkins restores elements of the stress rhythms of medieval English, with which Shakespeare (as in 'Full Fathom Five'), Milton (the choruses to Samson Agonistes ) and Coleridge ( Christabel ) had experimented before, and adds to them the rhythms of the choruses of Greek tragedy and those of ballad, nursery rhyme or hymn, such as he would have heard in the Romantic poets and in Christina Rossetti . Rather than simply counting the metre of a line in terms of feet, with a fixed number of syllables, sprung rhythm emphasises the occurrences of accent, or stress, and its interplay or counterpoint with conventional metre.The line of poetry may appear to be highly irregular, but it is patterned now by stress, emphasising both its individuality and its replication of a 'natural' speaking voice. In the St Dorothea poem, the reading voice is asked to place unexpected stresses on the lines 'I` am so light and fair`' and 'With` the basket I bear`'. This contrasts with the comparatively conventional iambs which conclude the line, 'Men are amazed to see me pass', and is then pointed up with the internally rhyming 'treats of sweets for bitter'. Even in this early experiment, the effect is of a rhythmic pattern suggested and then withdrawn, of a consistent sense of musical surprise being literally sprung on the reader.
Implicit within Hopkins's new conception of sprung rhythm is an attention to the individuality not only of the line of poetry but also of the objects which that line seeks to represent. As throughout his work, this artistic matter matches important theological concerns for Hopkins. The post-medieval theology of the Roman Catholic Church has its basis in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, a philosophy which brings together the teachings of Christ with the classical philosophical tradition. By the late nineteenth century, much of the thought of Hopkins's Oxford was caught between the positivism of science and an idealism in which it was increasingly implicit that the primacy of the subject as a perceiving self was won at the expense of an unknowable world of objects. In the face of such scepticism, that we can never know truths about the world, Hopkins's acquaintance with another medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, enabled him to find an aesthetic which would allow him to reconcile Thomist notions of ideas of essence and appearance with his belief that through the appearance of things we can know the real. Hopkins developed the term 'inscape' for the essence or haecceitas , the 'thisness' of the object. And for appearance, Hopkins developed the idea of 'instress', an active, vital power by which the perceived object forces its inscape on our perception. This instress is the power that the artist must seek to recreate, thus impressing on the audience the personality or inscape of the soul of the object represented. The conclusion to the truncated sonnet 'Pied Beauty', which is part prayer, part declaration of faith, affirms this: All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. This is a world of change and infinite variety, the gift of an Absolute who exists without change. The contrasts, freshness, strangeness, unrepeatable patterning of the perceived things of the world, are caught by the self of the poet and represented in a poetry which attempts to be just as various in itself.
One of the great dangers of such a celebration of individuality is the courting of difference, leading to the conflict that Hopkins's religious vocation might have been designed to foreclose. Another danger is of becoming overwhelmed by the perception of detail to the extent of obscurity. When Hopkins returned to poetry, in 1875-76, he wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland in sprung rhythm, delivering almost fully formed his new poetry and the considerable personal, theological and political concerns with which he had been struggling throughout his years of education, conversion and vocation. It is Hopkins's first major work, not written until he was 31, composed at the prompting of the editor of The Month and then rejected on the grounds of unreadability. In terms of its subject matter, it is certainly still a work of extraordinary difficulty, moving from the personal (the history of Hopkins's own faith and vocation) to a public event (the poem is ostensibly an elegy for five German nuns who drowned while fleeing religious persecution) and finishing with the controversial (it envisages the re-conversion of England to Catholicism). Its poetic form, too, is extremely ambitious, in thirty-five eight-line stanzas, which are frequently marked with stresses which demand the closest concentration on its endlessly surprising metrical effects and semantic punning. The literary and philosophical problems with which it deals, of evil, unnecessary death and eventual consolation, are all presented with a natural imagery and symbolism written in the hard accents of an English language performing at the limits of a vigorous and highly stressed experience. Hopkins succumbed to the protestation of his friends about the difficulty of his new verse and added an 'Author's Preface' for their assistance. Whatever this slight compromise, the initial failure of The Wreck of the Deutschland meant that it remained, along with the rest of Hopkins's poetry, unpublished in his lifetime.
Hopkins now felt that he could resume writing poetry in earnest, although he was never to attempt such a large project again. The dominant form of the rest of his career is the sonnet, a form which he was to make his own, but there were many experiments with sprung rhythm which produced a number of fascinating lyrics on the subjects of nature, martyrdom and chance. Initially, the poetry of Hopkins's return to writing is devotional, and in his poetry of the late 1870s, in sonnets like 'God's Grandeur', 'As kingfishers catch fire', 'Spring', 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty', or longer poems like 'Binsey Poplars', he writes of a nature 'charged with the grandeur of God'. Like William Wordsworth before him, Hopkins finds proofs of the existence of God in nature, yet doesn't follow Wordsworth into pantheism: the beauty of the natural world exists as powerful evidence of a Creator who allows its sensual delights to impress their inscape upon man. When, in 'Binsey Poplars', man is shown destroying nature, then Hopkins merges what would now be known as environmental concerns with a devotional reverence for the created world.
Throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, Hopkins found himself posted around Britain into various academic or parish jobs. His sermons and letters of this period, particularly those from his time in Liverpool and Glasgow, show a priest much shocked by the conditions in which his poor, often immigrant, parishioners lived, and suggest a growing concern with the state of what he calls a 'commonweal' or earthly kingdom in which poverty and unemployment were rife. A later poem, 'Tom's Garland', addresses the waste of the unemployed and those who seem to have no place in society, a state Hopkins contrasted with the vigorous labour of its companion poem, 'Harry Ploughman'. This growing social concern was to be clarified in the last move of Hopkins's life, in 1884, to the post of Professor of Greek and Latin Literature at University College Dublin.
Hopkins's arrival in Dublin was accompanied by controversy, given that he was an Englishman taking up an Irish job, echoing the row which surrounded John Henry Newman 's difficulties in setting up a Catholic University in the 1850s. The poetry which he now began to write also reflects this sense of estrangement and alienation from a society in which he was never entirely welcome, along with a sense of spiritual unease which matched his increasing depression and ill health. The so-called 'terrible sonnets' or 'sonnets of desolation' come from this period, in which Hopkins writes about moments of crisis and division rather than the vital celebration of distinctiveness and difference which had marked his earlier work. His rhythms are now adapted to this new subject matter, often straining to conflict and obscurity, as in 'Spelt from Sybil's Leaves' or 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'. Such last poems push his irregular sonnet forms as far as they can go, writing about an isolated self striving to seek unity of expression and belief, yet often caught on 'a rack / Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ( thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.' Hopkins was not to survive these experiences, and on 8 June 1889 he died of typhoid, aged forty-four.
While Hopkins never published any substantial scholarly work, he corresponded throughout his career with a number of English friends who were critics and artists, and this correspondence amounts to an extraordinary body of literary criticism on English poetry and classical literature. One of these friends, later Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges , collected Hopkins's manuscripts and, in 1918, finally published them. The impact on a modernist British and American poetry, which was now receptive to innovation and experiment, was practically immediate, and continued throughout the twentieth century. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), F.R. Leavis placed Hopkins along with Eliot and Pound at the centre of his account of modern poetry. Intense scholarly interest proceeded, and more of his poems, along with the letters, journals and devotional writings, were published during the 1930s and 1940s. W.H. Gardner re-edited the poems and produced a classic account of the poetry in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy (1944-49). The standard biography is Norman White's Hopkins: A Literary Biography (1992). Contemporary critical studies of Hopkins in books such as Walter Ong's Hopkins, the Self and God (1986), Eric Griffiths's The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), John Schad's Victorians in Theory (1999) and Matthew Campbell's Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) have read Hopkins's work in terms of his metrical, theological and theoretical innovation. Isobel Armstrong in Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1982) and Daniel Brown in Hopkins' Idealism (1997) have emphasised the centrality of his thought to late-Victorian debates over Hegelian idealism and science. More recent accounts of gender and sexuality in the circle of Hopkins and his Catholic contemporaries, such as David Alderson's Mansex Fine (1998), suggest that the most innovative English poet of the nineteenth century will continue to stimulate new critical accounts.
