In Our Time - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest who at times burned his poems and at others insisted they should not be published. His main themes are how he, nature and God relate to each other. His friend Robert Bridges preserved Hopkins' poetry and, once printed in 1918, works such as The Windhover, Pied Beauty and As Kingfishers Catch Fire were celebrated for their inventiveness and he was seen as a major poet, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian age. WithCatherine Phillips R J Owens Fellow in English at Downing College, University of CambridgeJane Wright Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristoland Martin Dubois Assistant Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 to 1889, has been called the greatest Victorian poet for his vivid imagery and his innovation with work such as the windhover,

Pied Beauty and As Kingfisher's Catch Fire. It was a Jesuit priest and his poems explore how he, nature and God relate to each other and what happens when those relationships are strained. He either couldn't or wouldn't have them published though. We know of them thanks to a friend who became the poet laureate and who revealed them 30 years after Hopkins' death in the age not of Tennyson and Browning, but of T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound. With me to discuss Gerard Manley Hopkins are

Catherine Phillips, the R.J. Owen's fellow in English at Downing College University Cambridge, Martin Dubois, Assistant Professor in 19th Century Literature at Durham University, and Jane Wright, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. Cathy Phillips, what do we need to know about Hopkins' childhood? It was in many ways a childhood that was typical of well-to-do Victorian families, in that the family were pious Anglicans, and they had an interest in their arts. Mandy Hopkins, Gerard's father, was an interesting man. He was apprenticed at the age of 16 to an insurance agent,

and by 1844, when Gerard was born, he had established his own business. He was also interested in music, in writing poetry, and published several volumes of poetry, and in sketching. And he also wrote comic stories and illustrated them himself to entertain the children. He was as well sensitive to nature and these things, both the attitudes to nature, the comedy, the interest in the various art forms, were very inspirational for Gerard.

I think he had a very strong influence on his son. Gerald was the first of nine children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. They lived at Hampstead, which was leafy, not at that point enveloped by the city of London, but close enough that they could go to art exhibitions, to museums and to concerts in the city. Of the other children, two of the sons became artists, professional artists.

One, Lionel, became an expert in ancient Chinese language. And of the girls, Kate was an artist. Grace, a musician, and Millicent, like Gerald, entered a celibate religious order. Gerald went to Highgate School from the age of 10 for part of the time as a border. There he was schooled in Latin and Greek very thoroughly, had some religious instruction, some maths, some history and some French. And if there he had some sort of rebellion, didn't he, took against this very severe head, Mars, right? I haven't got to the bottom of it in any of your notes. What happened?

Well, Dyn was something of a bully, and Gerald was somebody who, once he decided to do something, sort of adhered to it. And the anecdote, I don't know what the truth of it is, was that Hopkins decided that he would try to find out how long a sailor might go without liquid and tried it out until his own tongue was apparently black. Dyn found out and was absolutely furious.

And then Hopkins was sort of on warning. And then there was a cascade of small incidents that in the end meant that the Hopkins family decided that it would be better if Hopkins no longer boarded. And he finished his school days as a day border. It was a household that valued the arts and drawing and Ruskinu's influence on the early, very good drawings, Gerard himself.

and so he went on from Hampstead to Highgate to Oxford University, Martin Dubois, where we get a double first. What happened more importantly to him at that time than getting a double first? Well, his years at Oxford are some of the happiest of his life. It's where in many ways he finds himself intellectually, morally. What does that mean? Well, in terms of the shaping of his attitudes towards life, the most important thing that happens in Oxford is that he changes his religion.

affiliation. Now, Oxford at this time is driven by religious controversy. The shadow of the bitter disputes of earlier in the century of the emergence of the Oxford or Tractarian movement still hang over the university, which is divided between different religious parties. The Oxford movement wanted all churches to be one, and they're a very high church, they were very near the Roman Catholic church and so on, which was quite dangerous at the time. The Catholics were still, there was still a sort of ember of danger about them, but he was attracted. And the Oxford movement was moving in that direction,

Pusey and Newman and people like that. Exactly, exactly. Now, Hopkins goes up some years, some decades after the height of the detractarian movement, but it's still very current in Oxford. Quite quickly Hopkins takes up with the High Church party in Oxford. He becomes part of a group of undergraduates

who gather around the leaders of the High Church in Oxford. Pusey is one of them, Henry Parry Liddon is another, and he starts to practice devotions and pieties which wouldn't have been countenance by his moderate high Anglican parents. I think he particularly of practices such as confessing in person to Liddon, which is seen as very controversial,

often seen as a kind of popery in those times, and also various kinds of self-denying or ascetical practices, such as fasting. Which ties with the darkening tongue of the sailor, doesn't it really? It does, yes, yes, yes, it does. It does. It does. So, initially, Hopkins believes that the true inheritor of the tradition of the Pre-Reformation Church is the Church of England. But over time, he comes to think that the Church of England is not Catholic enough. And eventually, he comes to believe that he needs to become a Roman Catholic.

Now, Hopkins at this point in his life, has actually met very few Roman Catholics. But he, he takes what for an Oxford undergraduate in his position must have felt like an obvious step. He writes to the most famous of the early attractarian converts to Rome, John Henry Newman. And thereafter it's Newman who advises Hopkins and who will eventually receive Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church in October 1866. And it's the advice of a sensible father rather than a priest, isn't it? It's very sensible advice. Hopkins is, you know, understandably, in a difficult place. but Newman calms him down, also tells him he should go back to Oxford and finish his degree.

That's what Dad's do. Yes. So Newman has an important role in all this. But it's a very significant decision and break for Hopkins. Can you tell us emotionally why he moved to Catholicism? This was a strong Protestant family he came from. Anglicanism itself was a ripe religion at the time. The Oxford movement, as you have hinted, was a small,

area of turmoil, as it were, in the sort of religious politics. Is there any real reason that he moved in that direction? Did he have a sudden insight? Was he revelation? I think it's a gradual process. He has worries about the validity of Anglican Communion. That's something he worries about and eventually he's able to overcome what's perhaps the most, the largest obstacle in the way of his conversion, which is he's able to accept the authority of the Pope.

So this takes place over a good few years but it's a very large step. It's an enormous decision for him to make and one that risks estrangement from his family, from his friends from his previous background and experience. There is still the glow

of fear from Catholicism but only been accepted in 1829 which was not that long ago really and for centuries they'd been thought of as the great enemy it seems to me that he was taking quite a risk there and you talk about his family they cut him off to all in terms of purposes

for a year or two as I understand well as it happens I mean they are in enormous shock when hearing of the decision and there are very very distraught letters and anxious letters that are exchanged between Hopkins and his family when they hear of his plan to convert one of those letters that we have in draft form,

we don't know if it was sent, ends with his mother saying, oh, Gerard, my dear boy, are you indeed gone from me? This is the extent of it. You're right to say that the culture at the time is to a considerable degree anti-Catholic. So Pusey, Hopkins' recent religious mentor,

writes to him describing Roman Catholic converts as perverts. Yes, and he's a... Let's go back to his parents, advised him not to talk to his younger siblings. And his mother didn't want them influenced by this move of his. Jane Wright, he made friends with another man at Oxford, Robert Bridges. What was that to bring to him? Bridges was later to become the Porte Laureate. Yes, that's right.

Well, really, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say, had there been no Robert Bridges, we would have no Gerald Manley Hopkins. Bridges becomes an extraordinary, a lifelong friend, remains in touch with Hopkins throughout his conversion. It's a friendship that is troubled by that moment. Because he was baffled that he wanted to convert, wasn't he? Bridges was baffled at Hopkins wanted to trouble. He was baffled, and from what we can see from the letters,

Hopkins has to explain himself more than once. so he writes telling bridges that he wants, he's going to convert, and then he has to write again and he says, you know, you force me to explain again what I wanted you to believe before. And then there's this lovely sort of shop sign effect that he has in the letter with little manicures, little sort of fingers pointing in one direction. And he writes, trumpery, mummery and GM Hopkins flummery, designer, removed to the other side of the way, as if he's changing premises.

So there's this very lighthearted, sort of almost banter between friends, but he really wants Bridges to understand that this is what he's doing. I think that's quite a careful piece of self-presentation that he has there because the Trump re and Mumry seems to attach to him as much as it attaches to his sense of his Anglicanism at this point. But then really over time, Bridges becomes, from our point of view today, a guardian of the poems. So he writes out fair copies.

He writes to Hopkins repeatedly over the years asking him to explain himself. Can we come to that a bit later if you don't mind? Kathy Phillips, let's turn to his poetry. He's writing poetry, writing verse, so let's move straight to it. One of his best-known poems is The Windhover. Can you remind, can you tell us how it started and what was its significance as far as Hopkins' reputation is concerned?

Well, Hawkins always wanted to have his poetry read aloud rather than simply followed on the page. And that's very important for the windhover. Now, the wind hover is the European castral. And the castral, unlike many birds of prey, does not circle, but it flies into the wind, matching the speed with which it flaps its wings and holds its position, against the air that is facing it. The poem was written May the 30th, 1877, while Hopkins was at St. Bynos studying theology.

The poem itself runs like this. I caught this morning, Morning's Minion. Kingdom of Daylight's Dauphin, dappledorn-drawn falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath him, steady air. And striding high there How he wrung upon the rain

Of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy Then off Off forth on swing as a skates heel Sweeps smooth on a bow band And then towards the end He invoked Christ Yes, the poem Is in the form of a

Petrarchan sonnet And as with many of Hopkins' Sonnets The octave is devoted to a description Of a scene or something of that sort and the Cestead explores a Christian interpretation of the experience. No wonder of it. Shear plod makes plough down sillian shine,

and blue-bleak embers, ah, my dear, fall, gall themselves, and gash gold for million. What does that mean? Well, the common way of heating a house or a room at that time was through a fire and a grate. and when the fire has been out for a while the embers look as if they're cold

but if one of them should fall through the grate and fall onto the bricks below a bit would chip off perhaps and reveal that in the centre is a glowing heart still so in unexpected ways in common ways and mundane ways one sees light

that is associated traditionally with the present of Christ of God. Thank you very much. Martin Dubar, what was it that brought Hopkins back to poetry just a year or two before he wrote Windhover? Well, Hopkins,

after his conversion, relatively quickly after his conversion, decides to become a Jesuit. And as part of his commitment to his priestly vocation, he decides that he needs to give up the composition of poetry. And in fact,

sort of ritually burns his poems. having previously sent copies for safekeeping somewhere else, but he burns them as a kind of commitment to his priestly vocation. And thereafter it's seven years before Hopkins will return to writing poetry in any substantial way. Is there a tension between him, as he were, sacrificing his life, or pledging his life to God and writing poetry? Is there a sense at once a day is that poetry is something sensual and distracting

that keeps him away from his real vocation? I don't know about sensual and distracting. I certainly think it's about a commitment to, his sense of his commitment to his priestly vocation required him to put aside distraction. And in a certain sense, he understands his poetry not to form part of his priestly life and mission. To put this in context, at this point in the 19th century,

the Jesuits have an attitude to the arts, which doesn't, you know, they see it's a kind of recreation maybe, a kind of community building, but it's not something that's part of their spiritual mission. And Hopkins, in a way, sees that too. But as I understand it, he gave up writing Boja for about seven years. Yes. And came back only when he was advised or encouraged to do so by a superior in the movement

and when he wrote the Deutschland. Yes. Well, Hopkins reads about this shipwreck in the newspapers, and he's very moved by it, particularly by the wreck of the Deutsche. the wreck of the Deutsche Land, a German passenger ship which ran aground off the Thames estuary in 1875. Hopkins is very moved by this. He's particularly moved by the deaths of five German nuns who were aboard this passenger ship and who perished in the tragedy.

And there's a chance remark from one of his Jesuit superiors who says, someone should write a poem about that. And that sets Hopkins off. That's the kind of the license. that he needs. It's not necessarily an instruction, but it gives him a kind of authority to go ahead. And he also hopes that that poem might

appear in a journal published by the Jesuits. Now, in the end, they reject it. The editor hasn't seen anything like it, but it's the possibility of honoring his priestly profession by poetry that leads him back to composition after that seven years break. Also, it shows a tremendous

development from his earlier work seven years, from his work seven years and more earlier and very complicated. In fact, his friends, you mentioned Bridges, I say it's far too complicated and can't he write more simply than this, but it turns out that he can and he can't, but mostly he doesn't want to. Jane Wright, what was his way of celebrating nature? Which had mattered to him from a young man with copying Ruskin's drawings or drawing like Roskin. That's right. Well, the famous terms, which we may come to further later,

in-scape and in-stress. I mean, Hopkins is, wants to celebrate the specificity of natural, the natural world, natural creation, plants, creatures. He's drawn to that sense of, of heightened individuality, that creatures, in being yourself,

in finding selfhood, you display Christ. You celebrate God. So the nature poetry is in part that sort of reconciliation between God and the worldly for Hopkins. And some of it functions as a form of prayer, really, or as a form of praise. So Pied Beauty, it's one of my favorites. This is a kirtle sonnet, so it's shorter than a usual sonnet,

but it works as Hopkins is keen to say, because he's always keen to tell everyone. He works according to very strict rules on a kind of mathematical principle, proportionate to the regular sonnet. Pied Beauty, as in the Pied Piper or Magpies, so we're thinking about things that are party coloured. Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple colour as a brinded cow.

For rose-moles, all in stipple upon trout that swim. Fresh fire-cold chestnut falls, finch's wings. Landscape, plotted and peace. fold, fallow and plough, and all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. You want to go on with us, Hank Sanda? Yes, I can do. All things counter, original, spare, strange. Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how.

With swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle dim, he father's forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him. Is this a new voice in nature, I think it's a new voice in poetry. He is certainly rhythmically he's doing something very inventive. He's crushed, he's created this incredibly dense form, both, I mean, formally and linguistically,

what is happening here is very condensed and it's very visually creative. So, I mean, could we look at a few lines in a bit more detail? So the third line here, for rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. The poet is inviting us to look, is looking at animals and patterns of clouds, and we see these trout, these fish with pink spots on them. Rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. Because of the principles of rhythmic variation in there and the use of alliteration and similar vowel sounds,

he creates stippling in. is an artist's technique. It's something that an artist or engraver might do to create a speckled effect. And when we hear stipul upon, we're receiving a kind of spotty language, if you like. So there's something very vivid, synesthetic, visually and hourly about what he's doing here.

Cathy Phillips, he wrote of in-scape and in-stressed. Now, could you tell us about that? Well, both terms are ones that he coined. he adapted from simpler forms, they occur sometimes in letters, but most often in his own notes. They are therefore not defined and they're not used with philosophical rigour.

And we try to work out what they meant to him by working with the various contexts in which they appear. Some of the meanings that InScape has, for example, are when he's trying to make a note about something that he wants to draw, and he describes rushing, streams that may be inscaped in pillows and upturned troughs by which I think he's indicating upward curves and downward curves. More importantly, it can refer to the combination of features

that give a sense of the inner essence of a thing or a creature or a person as with the windhover. In-stress is something that's more associated with emotion. It can be the identifying personality that is communicated to a careful observer. It's also a force that holds a thing or a person together as one. We have got an instance of it in the wreck of the Deutscheland where he uses this in Stans of Five, where he says, I kiss my hand to the dappled with damson west, since though he, that is Christ,

is under the world's splendor and wonder, his mystery must be in-stressed, stressed, for I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand. I think we've got something that's chiastic, so the in-stressed might be partly explained by days I meet him, and stressed by I greet him, Greek Christ as he is visible to the poet

in the landscape around him. He's massively interested in the technique what might say the mechanics of poetry and he's constantly writing about it, Martin, but his life at that time, he was in the northern cities, Liverpool and Glasgow and then he goes across to Dublin. He's working in areas as a Jesuit priest

of extreme poverty, which distresses him a great deal. But also he feels a rebuttal. towards the filth, the hunger, not so much the filth, the starvation and so on. Can you give us an idea of the life he was living there? Well, that's right. So the nature sonnets that we've discussed

and the ideas of in-scape and in-stress comes to the full, particularly when Hopkins is living in rural Wales at St Bynos. But once he's become a priest, and he's ordained in 1877, he leaves St. Bynos and lives a life where he's moving constantly really from position to position,

Jesuits were moved a lot, and part of that is that he ends up being posted very often to northern industrial towns and cities. So he spent some time in Lee in Lancashire, he spends a short time in Glasgow, and I guess most importantly, he spends about 20 months in Liverpool,

where he witnesses extraordinary poverty. So here we have Hopkins, the upper-middle-class Londoner, encountering some of the direous, most dire conditions of poverty. Especially Irish Catholics who have come across from... Irish Catholics, an enormous increase in the population at Liverpool, and a tremendous overcrowding, and Hopkins is encountered with that. And he has, as you're saying, a mixed reaction.

So he's capable of great sympathy. That's undeniable. But there's also a sense of a revulsion and disgust. And that combines with Hopkins' often reaction. actionary fears about the moral and the spiritual health of the nation. Does he ever write about this? Well, there's lots in the letters. There's lots in the letters.

He says that my Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction of the misery of town life to the poor. And it's important to say that in this period where he's going between these different postings he doesn't write very much poetry. Those poems he does write though I think are interesting in that they maybe offer a different side to Hopkins's response. They're poems which often begin from his own priestly experience and in a sense try to come to terms with the people he's serving in these parishes despite the difference in their background and experience. Jane Wright, I mentioned that he is very, very concerned with the techniques of poetry

and extending them and breaking them and stretching them. Can you just talk about, for example, sprung rhythm, which is one of the things he uses? One of the things that's interesting about sprung rhythm is that Hopkins is keen to impress on bridges, for instance, to whom he writes about it, that he hasn't invented it. So he says, I haven't invented this. You can find lines of what I would call sprung rhythm in earlier poems by other poets. But I am the first to make a principle of it, he says. So it looks like taking a lot of license. License is a word that comes up in the correspondence a lot. But he says, I've turned this license into a law. And one way that we might think about how sprung rhythm works is in connection with accentual verse.

So that's the idea where you have a set number of beats, of heavy, you know, stressed syllables in a line, but then a variable number of lighter stresses between. We've discussed the Windhover. I caught this morning morning's minion king. That's the line. So he breaks the word kingdom. I caught this morning, Morning's Minion, Kingdom of Daylights, Dofan, Dapel, Dawn, Drawn, Fulkin in his riding.

You hear the heavy stresses almost as a musical principle. So the first line there has ten syllables. The second has 16, but they both have five beats. Why is it called sprung rhythm then? Why Hopkins chooses that term, I mean, he's thinking, it is a, a, a, a, a, way of handling rhythm which makes the lines stressy. It helps you to feel that kind of musical principle. This is not a technical term folks, but it makes the lines quite

boingy because you have, it slows and speeds up the way the voice is inclined to experience the sounds of those lines. So that's what he's doing. It's trying to make the lines be a bit experience not only in sense but in sound. That's right. I mean it's an energetic form. It's an energetic way of using stress. Roger. Yes, well it's absolutely crucial to Hopkins

that he thinks of poetry as a form of spoken sound. Yes, as Cathy has already said. And what sprung rhythm in many ways does is bring in some of the creative vitality that Hopkins sees in ordinary speech rhythms

into poetry. It's in a way a reaction against the over-regularization of poetic meters and inject greater variability whilst not losing the sense of the basic rhythm underneath. I think Phillips, how much he's in these industrial cities, is in Glasgow and is in Liverpool, is in Dublin to a certain extent in meeting, as has been briefly mentioned, extraordinary poverty and not knowing quite how to cope with it one way or another, although he has to cope

because he's out there in those districts preaching and teaching. What did he know of what else is being written in, let's call it, the world of poetry? He was extraordinarily in touch with contemporary writing. He was always interested in it. He was an avid reader of newspapers, of journals of the day. He read Jekyll and Hyde. He read Ramola. He read Far from the Madding Crowd.

He read Tennyson's volumes as they came out. He knew of Swinburne. He read Summer Swinburne. He knew of the Rosettys. He writes a poem in response to one of Christina Rosetti's poems. So he's got great interest in contemporary writing. So it was keeping up, as it were. Yes, very much so.

And keeping it correspondent with bridges about things that were going on. And with Dixon. And with another phone call it. Even more with Dixon, because Dixon was in touch with the pre-Raphylites. Yes. And so he's writing about something that's very much of mutual interest and mutual friends as well. Martin, Martin, Martin Juba. While in Dublin, he wrote what had been called the Terrible Sonnets,

Who called them the terrible sonnets? Robert Bridges. Why did he use that? He means terrible in the sense of inspiring terror rather than bad or incompetent. These are a group of poems that Hopkins wrote in the summer of 1885. And in different ways, they try to contemplate and in some sense come to terms with the difficulty of Hopkins

his religious, emotional and personal experience in Ireland, where he was very unhappy for much of his time there. Hopkins was felt like a kind of exile in Ireland. He was sent to Ireland to work at University College Dublin and also as an examiner for the Royal University of Ireland. And he feels himself in Ireland to be in a kind of exile. He's removed from his friends, his family, also from his own English Jesuit province.

And he's also an English patriot in Ireland at a time of in almost unrest and agitation for home rule. So these poems explore Hopkins' sense of isolation, weariness, unhappiness, and also a sense that the relief and the comfort that ought to be there from God is not there for him. Jane, is he, does he have some sort of breakdown at that time? Is that what he's thought?

I mean, he is certainly what we would now in a modern idiom describe as depressed, I think, at this moment. I mean, he's been moved around so much by this point. He's moved to 11 places across four countries in the space of eight years. No opportunity to settle at all. He's working very hard teaching. he has variable experiences of teaching. He doesn't always enjoy it. And he is going through a process of spiritual exercises

in which he is contemplating the fallenness of man and his own sins. So yes, it's a very difficult time for him. And he writes to Robert Bridges and says, if anything of mine has been written in blood, it's these poems. These poems include my own heart, let me have more pity on,

and no worse there is none. Is that when he's writing those poems? Those are two of the terrible sonnets, yes. Would you like to hear some? I think you should quote a few lines from one of them, which would you like? Can we try some No Worst? Yes, no worst there is no.

So, I mean, when the speaker here says no worse, he means there is no one worse than me. No worst. there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief. More pangs will, schooled at four pangs, wilder ring. Comforter, where? Where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries, heave, herds long, huddle in a main, a chief woe, world's sorrow on an age-old Anvil wince and sing, then lull. Then leave off. Fury had shrieked.

No lingering, let me be fell. Force, I must be brief. And then we get the famous line, oh, the mind, mind has mountains. I mean, I could take it to the end. Cliffs of fall deep. Cliffs of fall, frightful sheer, no man fathomed. Hold them cheap may who ne'er hung there.

Was that, how did Bridges receive that? Did they not say we must rush to publish this? Bridges and Dixon? He didn't in the end send them to Bridges, but they actually lay in a draw until after his death. So these are among the most private and personal poems that Hopkins writes,

unlike earlier poems, which were kind of circulated around his group of friends, the terrible sonnets, remain with Hopkins only until his death. It's still, it was strange to people listening to the poems that you, the three of you have so easy at your command and are so part of what modern poetry, let's call it that,

poetry since in the 20th century, was that they were his, in a way, they were private, they did not achieve any circulation at the time. Why do you think he was so, as it were, unspotted, Cadley? I think it was a good thing that he was so unspotted. I think that had he been more in touch with a 19th century audience, he would have been much less experimental than he was. I think he was well ahead of his time.

I mean, it's only with modernism from really not even 1918 but 1927, that Hopkins begins to find a real audience. And he's been dead for how long then? Well, the 1980 edition takes until 1927, and it's still not fully sold out at that point, and I'd had under 300 copies. He's Catholic at a time when there's suspicion of Catholic. I mean, the poems are quite overtly Catholic.

His rhythms are far more experimental than other poets were writing in the 19th century when Hopkins was writing. he's very much a Christian poet at a time when the importance of the church was waning so it took some time about 40 years after his death before they before he finds a proper audience

sorry they surfed at a time when another Christian poet was achieving great fame T.S. Eliot with his Christian poems. Well T.S. Eliot's it's yes yes indeed they come out at the right time as well is gradually increasing popularity or the understanding of his work. It's how he's understood. I mean, this is crucial.

He's published in 1918. That's when the first edition of the poems comes out. And as Kathy says, that doesn't really create much of a splash. It's the 1930 edition that really makes Hopkins' name. And what that means is that this Victorian poet appears right in the area of high literary and modernism. So that people start grouping Hopkins with T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound. So F.R. Levis writes a book in 1932 called New Bearings in English poetry, Hopkins, Pound, and Elliot. This is the kind of company that he is felt to keep at this point

in the 20th century. Yes. And it grows from, are the people around him that Levis couples him with, are they aware of him? Are they being influenced by him? Are they welcoming in? Or is it Levis is jamming them together? Where's the thing with Hopkins' legacy is that it's, and his influence is that he is so individually distinctive and idiosyncratic that often poets tend to go through a kind of Hopkins phase, which then peters out. So you see it, so W.H. Orden is one, where you see there's an obvious kind of Hopkins phase,

and then it kind of, you know, it enters a different mode. Same is true of Jeffrey Hill. Please. Same as true of Jeffrey Hill. We talked earlier, Jane, of his relationship with Robert Bridges at Oxford, and Bridges were kept an ironin, and then went on to Payne, poet laureate, and that sort of thing, kept in touch, very much in touch.

What is he doing to perpetuate Hopkins' reputation? Hopping dies in the 1880s, and it's 1918, he brings out this collection. But is he bringing it out for an act of piety, or does he think these things must be read and you must take notice of them? I think Bridges certainly thinks very highly of the poetry.

He starts, I think he's cautious because he's aware of how unusual, how unorthodox, how idiosyncratic this poetry can seem. And he starts to place individual poems in anthologies and sort of waits to see what reception that gets. And feeling, I think, encouraged by that, produces a very beautiful, the very beautiful volume of 1918.

I think it's only about 750 copies of that. And it's slow to sell. but Bridges again as the kind of guardian of Hopkins also writes a preface to that volume sort of introducing Hopkins to the public and referring to famously to the wreck of the Deutsche Land as the dragon at the gate sort of encouraging readers to get past that

very difficult and long poem and see what they make of this extraordinary new voice. What would you say was his influence then? I think his influence became stronger with poets of the latter part of the 20th century, early part of the 21st century even. And I associate him far more with people like Jeffrey Hill, with Heney in part, with Titus, Sylvia Plath. People who go through a Hopkins phase.

And when they're going through that phase, it's very much like having ventriloquism, because Hopkins coining Hopkins hyphenated words and so on, no matter who uses them, it always, the Hopkins voice always comes through. And Hopkins is very good at making people right very precisely, look at nature very carefully and express themselves there, but they then need to move on from that experience, that lesson. into things that are more characteristic of themselves.

One thing I would add to that is it may seem like a puzzle that this poet doesn't become known until long after his death, but in a way it happened the way Hopkins might have wanted it. He once he's kind of trying to think through how his poetry relates to his priestly vocation, he does often say in his letters something like, would that these poems could become known in some kind of spontaneous way without my having put them out there,

without my seeking poetic fame. So in a sense, what might seem like a puzzle is part of what Hopkins would have perhaps wanted. And we started by saying that he was seen as a great Victorian poet, but would you see him as a great Victorian poet, Cathy Or as a modernist poet? I'd seem very much as a Victorian poet, but a Victorian poet who was extraordinarily experimental, extraordinarily innovative. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Cathy Phillips, Jane Wright and Martin Leubour.

Next week, the Dane Law. when Alfred the Great and Gustrom, the Viking, divided England between them. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think I'd like to notice Funny Hopkins. I mean, we think of Hopkins as a religious poet. He is in some ways also a poet for our ecological times

because of this great commitment to nature, this great commitment to the individual in-scape of trees, plants, creatures, flowers and so on. But in the letters, what comes through time and again is this dry, witty, slightly wicked humour. He's very, very funny. He's very, very funny. There are all sorts of lovely exchanges. He writes from Dublin, for instance, on one occasion, having witnessed an organist getting drunk, he says, at the organ. And he says, you know, this was awful and awkward and embarrassing, but not without its delicate comedy.

In that sort of sense, you know, the sort of original sense of comedy as slightly a cruel thing. So he's, and the way he describes that, which I can't quote directly, is itself very humorous. So there was a very shy and very witty, funny man there, who

we don't always experience, I think, through the poetry in the same way as through the letters, where he comes to life. What would you like to have said, Martin, that you didn't get time to say? Well, I think one of the Jane talked really interestingly about how original some of the poetic and formal devices are of the nature sonnets. I think they're also very unusual in a religious sense. If you look at Hopkins' religious environment and his religious training, it is strongly ascetical.

The idea that you might need to conquer wayward tendencies, that the spiritual life is a kind of war, and that actually in order better to reach God, you need to deny self and world. Now, these poems are in a completely other direction to that. They celebrate the goodness of the created world, and they also believe in the rightness of the senses, that physical beauty can be a mode of, the appreciation of physical beauty can be a mode of religious understanding and appreciation.

And that's very unusual for its time. and in Hopkins' own contexts. Now, Cathy, can I ask you? I'd like to follow up what Martin's been saying because Hopkins follows an analogical model of the relationship

between God, Christ and the world in that what he sees around him says something about the nature of God or nature of Christ and he sees Christ as being imminent in the world and therefore that sensual interaction with the world is a matter

also of his religious faith, of meeting God, of contact in everything that he looks at, tells him something about Christ. Looking at a bluebelly, she's gone. Yes, indeed. Yeah. The line from as kingfishers, which is where he uses this word selving. He talks about the selving. It's a Hopkins coinage. So if you go to the OED to this day, under selve as a verb, to selv, as a verb, to selv. to express yourself. It simply says rare, only GM Hopkins.

But that is a poem in which we get the line for Christ plays in 10,000 places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes, not his, to the father through the features of men's faces. The sense of looking at the world around him and seeing Christ expressed through the selfhood, the individuality of other people. And also Christ, I mean, that's also Scotist. I mean that Christ is actually worshipping God through the world, through mankind. Is he among religious people, is he taken up as someone that they admire and cherish? Oh yes, very much so.

Hopkins has a number of different audiences, and one of those is very definitely a Catholic audience. And what are the others? People who enjoy poetry, who enjoy poetry that's doing highly experimental things, and as Jane mentioned, people who love the natural world and see it being endangered, these people also appreciate, Hopkins appreciation of it.

Yeah. Do you find, any of you find you can't because you won't even know in how to answer this question because it's so obvious to you, but not to many people. Do you think that sometimes these complications

do torment people's minds in trying to work out what's going on to distinct from enjoying what's going on? Or maybe the two must go together. The question here, it might be, why is Hopkins so difficult? And I think it is about how Hopkins thinks poems should convey their meaning. In his letter somewhere he says there are two kinds of clarity you can have. One way you're just kind of reading and you pick up the meaning straight away.

Or the other kind where it's dark at first. But when you make it out, the meaning explodes. And that's the kind of intensity and density of meaning that Hopkins wishes his poems to have. So they are difficult. They require absolute concentration. They're difficult to read casually. But that is the kind of impact he wants to have. I think the producer is coming into trying to make his contribution.

To your coffee? Tea, please. Tea, be lovely. Thank you. Two cheese. Kathy? Three cheese. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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