Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: A very informative and well-conceived text, which sets out to place the poet in his Victorian context.Divided into thirty-eight parts, each about eight pages in length, it is replete with copious notes, a timeline, an introduction, and notes on the author/scholars who contributed their expertise to this volume.The book is divided into seven parts, beginning with the places Hopkins lived, and which shaped his poems-beginning with London and environs, Oxford, Wales, Northern England, and finally Ireland.From there we move to the aesthetic and cultural contexts, which shaped Hopkins's vision and poetics: visual culture, the classics (Greek and Latin, especially), the British-based language of Anglo-Saxonism, and Hopkins's fascination with the interweaving of music and poetry.Then it's on to religious, philosophical, and theological issues in the poet's life, from Tractarianism during his Oxford years, to ancient Greek philosophy, the Bible, and Roman Catholicism during the Victorian era.Part IV focuses on the influence of nature, science and the environment on Hopkins's poetry, beginning with ecological issues, the degradation of the environment which so pained him, the ways in which the physics of energy impacted on his work, and finally industry and technology, as Hopkins saw these played out, especially in his years as a mission priest.Part V centers on gender, sexuality, and the body in Hopkins's work.This section is divided into four chapters: queerness and homosexuality, masculinity and the laboring body (the manner in which Hopkins admired the vigorous physicality of the working class male), then femininity and martyrdom (the five Franciscan nuns who drowned in the wreck of the S.S. Deutschland and St, Margaret Clitheroe, for example), and, finally, the erotic in Hopkins's work.
Source: Journal of Jesuit Studies
Author: Paul Mariani
Institution: Boston College
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410826544