from American Poetry Review,
September / October 2009
I think then no one can admire the beauty of the body more than I do, and it is of course a comfort to find beauty in a friend or a friend in beauty. But this kind of beauty is dangerous. Then comes the beauty of the mind, such as genius, and this is greater than the beauty of the body and not to call dangerous. And more beautiful than the beauty of the mind is the beauty of the character, the "handsome heart."
—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
in a letter to Robert Bridges, October 25, 1879
I. What happens when a poet goes silent?...
It is impossible to imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins forging his sensual
works without the anvil of his silences. His silences took three forms.
First, the permanent longing that haunts the poems is unequivocally
connected to the hands of a Jesuit who kept a vow of celibacy...
Second, the engines of Hopkins's sonnets run on the elected muteness of
his decision not to write for seven years in his early priesthood. In
an early letter to Robert Bridges, his closest friend, he writes, "What
I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no
more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were the wish of my
superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little
presentation pieces." In 1875, when he finally allowed himself to write
poems, at the bequest of his rector, he wrote his early masterpiece
"The Wreck of The Deutschland." This early refusal launched the rest of
his writing days, which lasted the next fourteen years. The writing,
electric, ecstatic, was shared with few...
Third, he chose to remain unpublished. AIthough he sought to publish
"The Wreck of The Deutschland" through a Jesuit publication
anonymously, the poem was eventually rejected. After that, he
discouraged nearly all publications unless approved by his Jesuit
superiors. But this deliberate muzzling created a foolproof endgame, so
that as long as he lived he blocked his poems from the world, for he
must have known his obscure, intimate spiritual contraptions were
unlikely to pass under Jesuit noses without complaint. The cloister of
silence he built around his poems contributed to their eccentric,
private grace and this rages still through the anthologies. It was not
that Hopkins stopped writing, it was that he stopped communicating: the
more his lips closed, the more his poems opened. That he did not live
to see himself appreciated remains a bittersweet insight. ...
Hopkins wrote to Bridges, who was constantly chiding him for his
obscurity, "Take breath and read [my poems] with the ears, as I always
wish to be read, and my verse becomes alright."
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