Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding (Studies in Major Literary Authors, V. 27)

As a Catholic poet who abandoned poetry for seven years after his conversion and began again only at the request of a jesuit superior, Hopkins was determined to use his gifts in the service of his religion. Those twentieth-century critics who have exalted his formal experimentation at the expense of his Catholic message ignore the earnest Victorian question asked, and answered, by the poet in a letter to Bridges: “What are works of art for? To educate. To be standards.”15 To R.W.Dixon, he explained, “Our society values, as you say, and has contributed to literature, to culture; but only as a means to an end.”16 When he broke his poetic silence to describe, in The Wreck of the Deutschland, the sinking of a German ship, the visionary experience of a Franciscan nun, and, by implication, the fate of godless countries, Hopkins was endeavoring to answer the call, put out by both Newman and Manning, for Victorian Catholics to create a literature of their own.

My purpose in this study of Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism is to restore the poet to his full intellectual and literary context by exploring his responses, in the poems and other writings, to the largely forgotten, but once noisy and contentious, culture of his Catholic contemporaries...I shall show how the preoccupations, dramas, and disappointments of the poet’s life often reflect the experience of his co-religionists and how, indeed, the trajectory of his career mimics the deflation of Catholic hopes during the second half of Victoria’s reign and the turn within the Roman Church in England from a triumphalist rhetoric of conversion to a more introverted and insular spirituality.

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