This thesis examines the nature of what I have termed "the sacramental vision" of Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Jones: it is an exploration of the mutually sustaining relationship between poetry and religion; or, as Jones puts it, between art and sacrament. The key to the relationship is to be found in language: the inherited language of theologian and poet is saturated with metaphor, sign and symbol, linguistic forms of a particularly resistant and irreducible kind. In literature, as in religion, such forms represent ultimate points of vision, to which in trust we assent, and from which we infer belief, that is, we are required to convert what begins as "an impression upon the Imagination" into a belief which may be tested by reason. The poet's renewal of such sacramental signs is a necessary exercise of the religious imagination if each generation is to remake the beliefs it has inherited. The opening chapter is an examination of the origins of Hopkins's and Jones's use of the sacramental sign and the subsequent chapters scrutinise the value of sign-making to the development of the poetic method of both poets. I suggest that this method is best elucidated through three controlling principles: the Coleridgean view of the sacramental potential of language helps to define the verbal content of the poem; the Thornist sacramental schema instresses the form of the poem; and the Newmanesque process of notional and real assent determines the grammar or inscape of the total oeuvre as a chronicle of the development of the poet's spiritual growth. Hopkins and Jones deepen our understanding of a grammar common to faith and belief, shared by poet and theologian, by claiming that poetry should be the tranforming crucible of the encounter between the experience of the poet, the reader and the divine.

The discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry in the twentieth century was a revelation for postwar poets, who discovered in both Hopkins's style and subject matter a voice seemingly bottled for their own time. This influence has not faded in the twenty-first century; in fact, it has grown all the more pervasive as poets from many backgrounds and nations have found, in the voice of this nineteenth-century Jesuit, a revolutionary way of addressing contemporary concerns relating to human imagination, ecology, "green" ethics, the role of art, and individual spirituality. The poets collected in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins engage with Hopkins in diverse ways. Some mention Hopkins or address some aspect of his life. Others channel his innovative poetics or address important Hopkinsian themes. All demonstrate the centrality of his influence in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, critics have mostly neglected the importance of Hopkins as a contemporary model, instead pinning his influence to the early twentieth century. In a climate where high modernism, Whitmanic free verse, and the confessional lyric are often held up as contemporary poetry's dominant forerunners, this book proposes a more complex genealogy, tracing back to Hopkins and his influential early admirers current strands of emotional and spiritual openness, pleasure in word play and sonic textures, and veneration of the dynamic material world. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1156/thumbnail.jpg

Thesis (BPhil)--Open University.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong. / Type-written copy.

Diss.--München, 1956. / Bibliography: p. 11-16.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1957. / Also available in print.

Diss.--München, 1956. / Bibliography: p. 11-16.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / Typescript and manuscript. V. 1. Text (29 cm.) -- v. 2. Score (49 x 33 cm.). Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-100).

This thesis attempts to define Hopkins' use of the word "inscape" in terms of a cultural tradition in which he shares. Inscape is basically a concern for ordering experience in both its temporal and eternal manifestations. Each individual is part of a vast, harmonious whole wherein the parts are related to one another and confront one another with their unique individuality. The order thus envisaged is upheld by God, who sustains relationships and reveals Himself in the communication between man and his world. The order that Hopkins encounters is the same order working through the artistic movement encompassed by the terms Renaissance, Mannerism, and Baroque. The Renaissance artist thought that man could become a part, of that order, using it to reach God, by means of the intellectual contemplation of beauty. The Mannerist challenged his oredecessors' logic, suggesting that man's problems were such as to impede the Neo-Platonic progression: if God is to be reached through the beautiful, the individual who cannot penetrate an ugly reality to ultimate perfection, who cannot rest content with a hypothetical ideal world, will fail to find peace or assurance. The Baroque artist admits the Mannerist's list of grievances, but responds with force and plenitude, believing that the emotional impact of a work of art can carry the will in a positive direction. The Baroque artist feels that God is very present in the material world and may be apprehended there. The basic order includes that material world as a necessary and lasting part of God consistant and continuous revelation of Himself. Michelangelo uses the term concetto much as Hopkins uses the word inscape, though more directly in terms of his art. Part of the ordered whole may be grasped and communicated in the harmonious ordering of the sculpted marble block. Michelangelo achieves his goal by working with Renaissance structures and the Manneristic breakdown of those structures. He resolves the Mannerist's conflicts not by turning to Baroque, but by returning to an expression of the Gothic yearnings of an earlier age. Hopkins is ultimately a Baroque poet, but the Renaissance ordering that must precede the Baroque sensibility is clearly evident in a large portion of his work, as is the disruption of order inherent in Mannerism. What Michelangelo sees as a threat, however, Hopkins sees as a trial of his faith in both God and this world. Michelangelo's retreat, however, serves to clarify Hopkins determination not to retreat. Michelangelo eventually loses the ability to project a concetto, and therefore endeavours to do something less concrete with his medium. Hopkins continually loses his instressing power, but constantly seeks to relate to the wholeness that he knows surrounds him. By postulating a relationship with his environment that demands an ability to meet that environment with an emotional as well as an intellectual stability, he has left himself in a position where often it is only volitional effort that will carry him through any estrangement from his environment. For the sake of his own inscape, as person, priest, and poet, he commits himself to making that effort. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Gerard Manley Hopkins' particular vision of reality derives from his intense and unique intellectual response to the fact of the Incarnation. In his view, the Incarnation so colors the world that each created thing, by virtue of its selfhood, expresses Christ. Hopkins' apprehension of the integration of the finite and infinite in all things, without the loss or diminution of either, creates his vision of a paradoxical world. The problem examined in this thesis is to what degree such a view of life is reflected in, and by, his poetry. There is no examination of purely verbal paradox, except insofar as it reflects or reveals the poet's vision of a paradoxical reality. In the investigation, Hopkins' letters, in particular, those to Robert Bridges and to Richard Watson Dixon, his early diaries, notebooks and journals, as well as his retreat notes, sermons and other devotional writings have been examined and have yielded valuable information about Hopkins' views of life and poetry. The focus of the investigation, however, has been the poems themselves. It is with these that the study was begun, and to these that it constantly returned. From that study, it became apparent that definite themes recur in Hopkins' poetry. When the poems were grouped according to theme, it was found that certain poems center on natural beauty and man's response to it; others on the idea of sacrifice; still others on the problem of suffering, and yet others on the fact of death. An examination of each of the poems in these groups revealed that Hopkins' poetry is his response and solution to the problems posed by his simultaneous awareness of the apparently contradictory elements in reality. In that group whose theme is mortal beauty emerge the paradoxes of the changing creation revealing the changeless creator, of God's simultaneous immanence in, and transcendence of, his works, and of man's consequent difficult, but necessary, response of attachment to, and detachment from, mortal beauty. From those whose theme is sacrifice emerge the paradoxes of the beauty and the merit of the good which the poet voluntarily, but with difficulty, abjures in his own life, and of the denial of self as the highest fulfilment of self. From those whose theme is the problem of suffering emerge, in one group, the paradox of the reconciliation of God's mastery and his mercy, and in another, of the poet's isolation from, and unity with, God. In the first such group, the reconciliation has been facilitated by a prior struggle and enlightenment of the poet. In the second group, the desdlate sonnets, emerges acceptance through indomitable faith, rather than reconciliation. From the final group, whose theme is death, emerges the paradox of the resurrection. This paradox bring Hopkins full circle, for, in the new life, mortal beauty has become immortal. It seems, then, that it is Hopkins' awareness of the duality of the response imposed on him by his perception of these paradoxes, and his efforts to make that response, which give to his poetry its particular tension and intensity. The poetry is the record of the poet's efforts to explain the inexplicable. Although the chronological and thematic progression of response do not always go hand in hand, in the main, they do. There is a definite progression from the poet's happy and untroubled acceptance of the mystery in "Pied Beauty", through his more difficult, yet none the less fully accepted reconciliation in "Carrion Comfort", through his anguish in the desolate sonnets, to his final ringing cry of faith in "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". In his relentless questionings of the mysteries inherent in his views of a paradoxical world, Hopkins refused to surrender either his intellect or his faith. His poetry testifies to both, and each enhances the other. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate