Looking Hard at Hopkins

...For Hopkins, scenery was always animate...

...But Hopkins wanted to return to the ancient poetic concept of "stresses" rather than "feet"—to a more fluid poetics, not unlike the experiments of Walt Whitman...

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

...His sole love was an unrequited infatuation with a handsome young man—again, not an uncommon experience among youths in all-male schools...

...Initially, Bridges (a popular poet himself) was simply bewildered by "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and urged his friend to make it more accessible...

...Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and was primed to welcome the unconventional Victorian, who appeared to have discovered Modernism several decades before anybody else...

...Hopkins was drawn to the Jesuits because their combination of discipline and intellectual inquiry suited his temperament...

...His family and Protestant Oxford friends believed he had needlessly sacrificed himself to an overly rigorous and mistaken vocation...

...His Superior in the Society of Jesus had assigned him to teach at the Roman Catholic "Royal University of Ireland...

...Dearly as he desired it, Hopkins never achieved publication during his lifetime because he refused to compromise his radical style...

...Hopkins retorted, "I cannot think of altering anything...

...The choice of a sacrificial priestly vocation was of a piece with Hopkins' willingness to explore both ecstasy and suffering, whatever the cost to his emotional well-being...

...If there is a touch of the stolid about Bridges...

...By 1918, the literary world had acclimated to the work of W.B...

...Pusey, the austere Anglican saint who was the young man's confessor prior to conversion...

...Those who tended him felt he had lost the will to recover, and he died in 1889 at age 44...

...His peculiar metrics and Catholic religious themes were considered difficult even by sophisticated readers, trained as they were to appreciate the regular iambs of English verse, the gentle pantheism of Wordsworthian pastorals...

...His Superior eventually decided to recall him to England, but by that time he had caught typhoid fever...

...As Martin observes in his Introduction, Hopkins tends to become a "special kind of friend" to close readers...

...The local educated people whose company he might have enjoyed were Protestants, but as an Englishman, a convert to Roman Catholicism and, still worse, a member of the notorious Jesuit order, he was automatically excluded from their society...

...Martin understands, too, the full significance of Hopkins' relationship with his old friend from Oxford, Robert Bridges, the recipient of most of the priest's mature poems...

...Martin is especially good at delineating character...

...One colleague reported seeing the priest's pupils dragging him round the room by his heels...

...The aspect of his poetry most disturbing to contemporaries, though, was the pent-up feeling bursting through his stanzas...

...And the Jesuit discipline, deliberately military in character, bound him to a fairly standard routine...

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

...E.B...

...Finally, because Martin's critical readings match his perception of character, his appreciation of Hopkins' complexity is most persuasive...

...So he did, but not until 29 years after his death, when Bridges published the verse...

...Consider the religious ecstasy of "The Wreck of the Deutschland": My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace Or, at the other end of the emotional scale, the self-laceration and powerful evocation of depression in the Dublin-inspired "Terrible Sonnets": I am gall, I am heartburn...

...The Jesuit's fascination with nature received added impetus from the writings of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, who saw God's grandeur revealed in creation...

...Martin's biography excels not because he unearths hitherto undiscovered nuggets about his subject, but because he weaves the existing material into a subtle, penetrating portrait...

...In part, this failing stems from Hopkins' largely interior life...

...it is also the source of the strength on which Hopkins counted so much...

...In Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very PrivateLife (Putnam, 448 pp., $29.95) Robert Bernard Martin recounts the familiar story of how this remarkable writer, who possessed an acute ear for the rhythm and music of English, forged his theological convictions, vision of nature and personal anxieties into a unique poetic voice...

...Others in the order dismissed him as a sensitive plant, incapable of finding a niche...

...FANATICAI Hopkins admirers cannot forgive what they perceive as Bridges' early obtuseness...

...Yeats as well as T.S...

...Fellow clergy noted with concern that the newcomer kept himself aloof and appeared depressed...

...Used to the genteel academic climate at Oxford, he felt alienated by an institution with no library to speak of, and where students became so boisterous he frequently lost control of his class...

...His poems, journals and letters show him to be vulnerable, confiding...

...What you look hard at seems to look hard at you," he wrote in his journal, which explains why his verse about trees, skies or birds is never static...

...Writers & Writing LOOKING HARD AT HOPKINS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL ?VERWHELMED by the dirt and brutal poverty of 19thcentury Dublin, the fastidious new priest wrote plaintively in a sonnet sent back to friends in England, "To seem the stranger lies my lot...

...God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me...

...ready to put up with small snubs because he has the loving insight to see [the affection...

...Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood rimmed the curse...

...John Henry Newman, in whose writings Hopkins discovered a soulmate, and who received him into the Catholic Church...

...Hopkins occupies center stage, of course, but there are brilliant cameos of prominent individuals who touched his life, including: Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater, Oxford tutors of the future poet...

...Why shd...

...That view not only belies the evidence of the journals, letters and contemporary accounts, it also vulgarizes readings of the verse...

...Once, he alarmed his housemates by blowing ground pepper through a keyhole in an attempt to break up a closed meeting...

...It is odd, in fact, that previous biographers have not similarly managed to create the impression that we know the man...

...Increasingly eccentric, he wept when trees were cut down and suffered spells of hypochondria...

...Hopkins was, unfortunately, none of these things...

...No one sounds quite like him...

...The author does equally well with lesser known figures like Hopkins' lost love Digby Dolben, who at 17 was so enamored of ritual practice that he visited Newman's oratory in a monk's habit with bare feet...

...None dreamed that his tragically brief, apparently unsuccessful career would one day be fully redeemed by the poetry he had written and never published...

...By taking a hard look at this difficult, endearing writer, Martin enables his readers to feel the returning gaze of Gerard Manley Hopkins—dead for over a century, but still lively on the page...

...Martin shares Hopkins' quick eye for the telling detail and wry sense of irony...

...The official Jesuit obituary characterized him, somewhat ambiguously, as "a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his body...

...Noting the dangers inherent in interpreting the nature writings as pure, joyous expression, or the "Terrible Sonnets" as simple reflections of a soul in torment, the author argues that the best poems exhibit, and spring from, conflict: "As a man he was torn apart when he was in doubt, but it was precisely when he was impelled, perhaps neurotically, to examine all aspects of a problem, including its unattractive side, that his poetry came most fully alive...

...His Catholic conversion in the 1870s, while a student at Oxford, was almost faddish at the time, the equivalent of becoming a Communist in the 1930s...

...even wouldbe imitators cannot capture the peculiar intimacy and inflection of his lines...

...In addition, his unusual reserve prevented him from easily making friends, and his conversion estranged him from his family, although there are indications that he may have been the one who accentuated the coolness...

...Martin sees the situation differently: "The more one reads of the one-sided correspondence between the two men [all letters to Hopkins were destroyed], the more Bridges' character shines out as imperturbably patient and understanding...

...Describing a parish job the poet briefly held in Liverpool, he comments: "A young, vigorous, athletic, unquestioning devout priest with a gift for administration, double entry bookkeeping and leadership of the young, who loved to preach to enormous congregations ready to be swayed by his words, could hardly have found a more congenial setting...

...As a Christian and a poet, he would certainly have concurred with his biographer's contention that such vulnerability, while sometimes excruciatingly painful, bears the fruit that caution cannot nurture...

...Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours...

...The external facts, moreover, are relatively undramatic...

...Many previous biographers, attracted to the poetry's welter of emotion, have made Hopkins sound like an esthete, a hysteric— in short, "Percy the poet...

...Without that strength Hopkins' mercurial intelligence and immense talent might have been hopelessly diffused, and he knew it...

...Moreover, the highly selective Society of Jesus would never have accepted, much less kept, so effusive a person in its ranks...

...Researchers are further hindered by the scarcity of firsthand material, a result of the Victorian cult of privacy that was compounded in Hopkins' case by the burning the day after he died of his personal papers not entrusted to others...