Poets by Vocation

...he found in shared labor an approximation of the "good society" based not on power but on mutual trust—something like the anarchic ideal of Godwin or Kropotkin...

...He abhorred any society that exploited part of its members for the benefit of others...

...He received the gentle reply, "Besides money, you know, there's love...

...Merton and Hopkins were poets by vocation, both believing in an intrinsic relation between the attempt to make the word flesh, and the effort to establish communion with the hidden God—a concern shared equally by such "irreligious" poets as Yeats and Lawrence...

...Woodcock is not a practicing Christian, and he is politically an anarchist...

...I cannot lose him...

...They are the Romantics of religion...

...Religion insists that our conflicts can be resolved, and more, that actuality and metaphor (or body and spirit) are inexorably moving toward union...

...He still wears the name of Thomas Merton...

...Yet it is not easy to forgive the second-rate writer who was patronizing, and sometimes downright cruel, to his more worthy companion...

...so that although his natural social and emotional life had been contracted, his mental imagery had received a rare form of fertilization...

...Despite her claim that she wants to examine the "chemistry" of the writing, serious examination of the poetry is limited...

...In Kitchen's biography, Hopkins emerges as an enthusiast and a "sensitive plant...

...The author points out that this training sharpened Hopkins' "already keen ability to re-live and describe the sensations of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell...

...His famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), is both the story of how a worldly young man became a cenobite, and the exploration of the paradox of dual existence...

...Within the space of a few years, a rather precious young poetaster, who affected Romantic notions and "artistic" cravats, was transformed into an austere priest whose face was already ravaged by the strain of represssing an ardent temperament...

...He was, first and foremost, a poet whose intense, Blakean vision permeated both prose and verse in over 50 books on a bewildering variety of subjects...

...In the end, life and art seem to have coexisted as closely as is possible in our schizophrenic world...

...Nevertheless, Merton moved from the position that "one of us has got to die," to a complex acceptance of the many-faceted existence he had chosen...

...But the failure may be a blessing in disguise, to judge from what little criticism we are offered...

...At the same time, from his 26th year until a month before his death, he lived as a Cistercian monk within the walls of the Gethsemani abbey in Kentucky, vowed to silence...

...Bridges, having "outgrown" his own Anglo-Catholicism, hated and feared the Jesuits...

...Thomas Merton never performed a sacradotal act...

...He is still on my track...

...Readers who willingly suspend disbelief when confronted with an artist's privately formulated ideology (Yeats' occultism, Lawrentian "psychology") frequently balk at a theological system, where the poet is merely a spokesman...

...later, he broke off the correspondence for a time once more after Hopkins expressed his belief in a bloody proletarian revolution...

...after all, without him, there is the possibility that Hopkins' verse might never have come to light...

...This also prevents a full appreciation of the poet, since his self-revelations were largely confined to his work...

...One finds," notes Woodcock, "the witness of life, as against the rejection of the world, constantly exemplified, and there is no doubt that the monastery entered deeply into his writing both as an experience and as an unexpected liberating factor...

...Had Merton not become a monk, Woodcock suspects, "there is nothing to suggest that he would have turned out to be much more than a worthy academic scholar...

...Catholic writers are, perhaps, the worst sufferers, since in addition they attract apologists whose interest in verse is secondary to a passion for dogma...

...It was his religious life that gave Merton the special experience and the inner dynamic that forced him to keep on writing, and also provided the creatively inhibiting circumstances—lack of time and privacy and a censorious conscience—that narrowed the impulse like a jet of water and heightened the intensity...

...George Woodcock's Thomas Merton is, fundamentally, about these convergences, and, like Merton, he helps us come to terms with our own duality...

...This is typical of mystics—who break through conventional ways of seeing to convey the immediacy of their vision...

...More disappointingly, like most of Hopkins' biographers, Kitchen seems to lack a temperamental affinity with her subject...

...For when Merton became "Brother Louis," there was still "this shadow, this double, this writer who has followed me into the cloister...

...You are my public, and I hope to convert you...

...not the regular pounding beat that can make sex, music, poetry, or field-work dull, but the inventive cross-rhythms and suspense that may be found in lovemaking, in Beethoven and ragtime, in street-rhymes, and in black work-songs where the beat hangs in temporary limbo over the rest bars...

...He died of typhoid and despair, but the conversion he predicted took place, making it possible for another century to fully appreciate his genius...

...All our lives we strain to bridge the gap between instinctive experience and language, the foundation of our society...

...In his last decade, he made an extensive study of Eastern religions, hoping, in Woodcock's words, to "go beyond the reunion of Christians toward a wider understanding between Christians and men of other faiths and even men without—in the conventional sense—any faith at all...

...He is supposed to be dead...

...The famous Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuits' founder, Ignatius Loyola, rely heavily on the imaginative use of sensory images...

...Like many Oxford undergraduates of the 1860s, Hopkins' conversion to Roman Catholicism followed the example of his hero, John Henry Newman...

...Although his early work sometimes lapsed into parochialism, as he matured he grew increasingly preoccupied with civil rights, pacifism, experimental poetry, and the groves and high places of mysticism...

...And in his direct, forceful style, he continually wrestled for fresh symbols to express experiences, rather than concepts...

...For, as she explains, she was drawn to her subject because "I was anxious to explore the creative chemistry behind the words that affect me, an agnostic, so strongly...

...What would the celibate Hopkins have made of this...

...Kitchen suggests that the indifference of a fellow-student, with whom Hopkins appears to have been in love, helped along the decision to enter a religious order...

...Merton himself, though, was a radical who did not write for the pious...

...Woodcock's admirable study traces the gradual resolution between these two figures: "Father Louis never published a line under his monastic name...

...He rides my shoulders, sometimes, like the old man of the sea...

...For instance: "[Hopkins' prosody has] an imaginative sexual touch...

...to move from isolation, loneliness and despair to the hope of lasting relations...

...Why should I? I do not write for the public...

...l. n Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet (Farrar Straus Gi-roux, 220 pp., $3.95), George Woodcock places great emphasis on a statement Merton made a few years before his sudden death in 1968: "It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt I have to live with) but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will probably die as one...

...The pivotal figure in Hopkins' life was his long-time friend and fellow-poet, Robert Bridges, who acted as his poetic confidant, and who finally published a small body of poems by Hopkins after the latter had been in the grave for 30 years...

...If she were more passionately responsible to Hopkins, her research would lend itself to greater insights...

...Kitchen's book, for all its meticulous research and judiciousness, has its faults...

...In Gerard Manley Hopkins (Atheneum, 243 pp., $10.00), however, Paddy Kitchen spares the Jesuit poet this fate...

...But whatever the personal cost of converting, it appears to have been the making of him as an artist, and he soon began to write his passionate religious lyrics in the metrical innovation he had invented called "sprung rhythm...

...Is it the name of an enemy...

...Merton had, indeed, no reason to question his literary vocation...

...Still, more than masochism directed him to choose the tough, quasimilitary discipline of the Society of Jesus...

...Upon reading "The Wreck of the Deutschland," Bridges was so bewildered by its originality that he wrote furiously that no amount of money could induce him to reread it...

...Woodcock's understanding of the writer is always sympathetic and profound, even when gently critical...

...one cannot, in fact, imagine a more sensitive portrayal...

...When Hopkins first entered the order, Bridges refused to write to the lonely seminarian...

...Poor Hopkins, cut off from literary society by the regimentation of his order, ahead of his time in his understanding of metrics, was, on occasion, moved to impatience with his not very satisfactory correspondent, as when he replied to some condescending poetic advice, "I cannot think of altering anything...

...Kitchen tries hard to be fair to Bridges...

...He unhappily noted in his teens that it was his "misfortune to be fond of and yet despised" by those who most attracted him, a situation that occurred again and again in his brief 45 years...

...Poetry is the art most directly involved with trying to unify what is felt and what is expressed...