Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

From Image Update comes news of a new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

"Gerard Manley Hopkins by poet and biographer Paul Mariani is a dense and ambitious book that earns its subtitle: A Life.

Mariani's biography of Hopkins is not the first, but being both a poet and a Catholic himself, Mariani is uniquely suited to the task of emphasizing both the poems themselves and the importance of Hopkins's Catholic faith. He begins the biography with Hopkins's years at Oxford when he is wrestling with a desire to become Catholic.

This focus on Hopkins's "going over to Rome" is necessary to the rest of the story, because it is Hopkins's religious belief that ultimately informs his poetic vision, his devotion to the sacraments of the church that sheds light on his trust in the beauty and goodness of the physical earth and which ultimately leads him to write the poetry that Mariani describes as "lettered and saturated with a language shimmering with the possibilities of a sacramental vision of the world around us."

With an attentiveness to the quotidian reminiscent of Hopkins himself, Mariani searches out the details - in Hopkins's journals and letters written while at Oxford, while teaching young Jesuits, and during the process of taking of his vows. Mariani provides very little commentary on the events he relates; instead, he writes in the present tense, allowing us to simply live the moments along with Hopkins, to experience his delight as he catches the inscape of a horse and formulates his ideas about sprung rhythm, as he questions his calling and struggles with depression. And through his journals, Mariani presents us with gems like this: "Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self."

Thus, long before Hopkins embraces his poetic calling, we glimpse in his journals and letters early hints of a tendency to stare at and render the dappled world in his odd and lovely prose. What interpretation Mariani does give he provides by recapitulating lines of Hopkins's poetry so that they become tiny echoes or foreshadowings of Hopkins's life; by the time we get to his poetry, we are already steeped in it. And Mariani's readings of Hopkins's poems are elegant, deep explorations rather than critical analyses. He's at his best when he's riffing on some line of a Hopkins poem, when the biographer's prose is so saturated with his subject's poetry, so immersed in the poet's mind, that it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Click here to buy the book. To read an Image web-exclusive interview in which Paul Mariani discusses the book, click here."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tim Lowly - Twilight Rise.