Poems so far removed as Hopkins’s came to be from the ordinary simplicity of grammar and metre, had they no other drawback, could never be popular; but they will interest poets, and they may perhaps prove welcome to the critic, for they have this plain fault that aiming at an unattainable perfection of language (as if words - each with its two-fold value in sense and in sound - could be arranged like so many separate gems to compose a whole expression of thought, in which the force of grammar and the beauty of rhythm absolutely correspond), they not only sacrifice simplicity, but very often, among verses of the rarest beauty, show a neglect of those canons of taste which seem common to all poetry.[1]

It was with these words that the poetry of G.M. Hopkins (1844-1889) was introduced to the public by his long-time friend, the Poet Laureate of 1913, Robert Bridges, in 1894. The well-established Victorian ex-doctor (so famous in his time as to be mentioned in the introduction to Shaw’s Pygmalion[2]) collected Hopkins’s writings after the Jesuit’s death of typhoid in 1889 (b. 1844) and began their gradual presentation to the literary world, first in anthologies (A. Miles’s Poets and Poetry of the Century, 1893, 1 poem, and Bridges’s own The Spirit of Man, 1915, 6 poems), then, in 1918, in the first edition of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As can be seen from the lengthy quotation above, Bridges was doing his duty to his late friend with very mixed feelings. He seems to regret the “Keatsian sweetness” [3] of Hopkins ’s early poetry, and his main objections to Gerard’s later “experiments” include accusations of “mannerisms, oddity, obscurity,” as well as “the omission of the relative pronoun”[4]. The Poet Laureate (d. 1930) must have been amazed by the stir his protégé’s poetry started to make in the 1920s. In fact, Hopkins influenced whole generations of poets (such names as Thomas, Auden, Gurney. and Hughes are among the most often-quoted examples), and more importantly, achieved an independent place of his own in English poetry either as a fruitful innovator or as a flamboyant coda to the Victorian tradition. Of the major critics of English poetry, only one says that he “cannot share the enthusiasm which many critics feel for this poet:” T.S. Eliot[5], but his dismissal of Hopkins as having “very little to offer us” reflects badly on his, rather than the Jesuit’s, reputation. 

Ironically, too, Hopkins much exceeded his master, Robert Bridges, in importance and impact in later poetry. The number of poems by the two friends published in various anthologies is telling: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1929): Hopkins 2, Bridges 3[6]; The Penguin Book of English Verse (1956): Hopkins 8, Bridges 1[7] ; The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1979): Hopkins 16, Bridges 0[8]. Nowadays, Bridges is more famous for his discovery of Hopkins than for his own poems. Also, some critics discuss Hopkins ’s influence on Bridges (e.g.[9]) while no reciprocal impact is studied. 

Early criticism of Hopkins ’s poetry developed, roughly, along two principal directions. One approach, represented by the poet’s fellow Jesuits, naturally concentrated on Hopkins the Jesuit (his minor religious poems and extracts from journals were published now and then in Jesuit periodicals); they tended to be rather biographically- or even hagiographically-oriented, the story of Hopkins ’s conversion and vocation being obviously attractive to Catholics. 

The other approach stressed his innovative use of language, his experiments in rhythm, metre, and style. Indeed, these features of his oeuvre must have seemed most striking to his early readers, for they constituted the main difference between the Victorian/Georgian poetry of his contemporaries and that of G.M. Hopkins. (This does not mean that the former poetry was devoid of such experiments. Swinburne can be cited as an obvious example here). Those who were privileged to be able to discuss the poems with their author himself showed either incomprehension and/or mistrust (Bridges, Patmore - both of them well-known poets in their time) or bewildered encouragement (Canon Dixon). It is also from this group, unable to judge the true significance of Hopkins ’s religion and vocation, that there originated the belief that his Catholicism was a burden to, and foe of, his independent talent - that Hopkins wrote as he did in spite of his being a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit. 

This conviction was strengthened by the fact “that the Victorians did not assume … that a strenuous effort on the readers part is likely to be required before the riches of a poem become fully apparent.” [10] Hopkins must have been well aware of that: “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. … But as air, melody is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry”[11]. This “oddness” was hastily ascribed to the poet’s religious life. “His religious vocation puts a wall between his life and ours only reminiscent of the wall of a madhouse,” a critic wrote[12]. 

A breach in the wall of the madhouse was made in the 1920s, when “the intensive reading of an English poetic text was pioneered. … Laura Gidding and Robert Graves were early exponents of this close reading. which was systematically developed by I. A. Richards and elaborated by William Empson”[13]. Confronted with this new critical approach (which Hopkins himself had been using quite independently in his “private” analyses of Greek and Latin texts), Hopkins ’s poetry becomes not only readable, but full of beauty and meaning. 

As he himself stated, his poems have to be read “more than once”[14]. This is why the 1920s saw a sudden rise of interest in Hopkins - though it took as much as ten years to exhaust the 750 copies of the first edition (1918) of his collected poems. The response was polarized: some found Hopkins to be a passing whim of an over-sophisticated public, another “Qu’est-ce qu’ils ne vont pas chercher” of the elite; others indiscriminately exaggerated his importance. It must be remembered that Hopkins was regarded chiefly as a metricist; the main interest was more in his metrical experiments than in the meaningful content of his works - possibly still because of the lingering “religion complex” of some of his readers. Arthur Mizener’s simple remark (“there is nothing eccentric in thinking like a Catholic”[15] appeared in his essay on Hopkins as late as in 1944. It is only quite recently that the analysis of the meaning of his poems has been developed and Hopkins ’s position as the link between the (Victorian) tradition and modern poetry safely established. 

Once a reader (or a reading generation) accepts Hopkins ’s rhythms and metre, his attention is increasingly drawn to the content of the priest’s poems. In fact, Hopkins tried, throughout his life, to work out his own philosophical system where God, man, and nature, faith, life, and beauty would exist in their very essence. His subsequent poems are in a way reports of his developing views, from the aesthetic early Keatsian verses, through the great explosion of the Wreck of the Deutschland and the apogee in The Windhover, to the darkest sonnets of desolation of his “terrible” period in the mid-1880’s. Each poem is a jewel of condensed philosophical meaning, and Hopkins ’s ability to “pack” thought into his favourite vehicle, the sonnet, is probably the most significant feature of his oeuvre. Three groups of influences might be described as crucial in the formation of Hopkins ’s philosophy. 

First, Hopkins has always been widely read, since his youngest years. The Classics, English poetry, contemporary criticism, together with an increasing number of philosophical, theological, and religious writings, were all studied with Hopkins ’s well-known, incredible intensity. Theocritus, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Ruskin, Pater, Newman, Duns Scotus, St. Ignatius Loyola, formed a basis - very heterogeneous, as can be seen - for Gerard’s “plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight”[16]. Of the above, the latter five are usually considered to be of particular importance. A combination of Pater with St. Ignatius might seem arbitrary. In Hopkins , however, both influences are vital and surprisingly coexistent, resulting nevertheless in an interesting and creative tension. 

The second group of influences was that of Hopkins’s friends and contemporaries: Bridges and Patmore, two recognized talents and Gerard’s first critics; Canon Dixon, his first admirer; E.H. Coleridge (S.T. Coleridge’s grandson) and Digby Mackworth Dolben, with whom he discussed his and his friends’ early poetry. Sometimes members of this group overlapped with the major influences of the first: Pater was Hopkins ’s tutor in Oxford , Newman received him into the Catholic Church and helped him with his vocation. It seems from his contemporaries’ memories that Hopkins was always eager to communicate, with “a touch of childishness about his enthusiasm;” and though a fellow undergraduate described Gerard as a “gusher,” he found it an acceptable trait because Hopkins always meant what he said.[17] This attitude must have stimulated a rich flow of ideas. 

Finally, on top of the basis of his reading and his contemporaries’ impact, comes the elaboration and ordering by Hopkins in his meditations. A habit since his youth, they became his duty after taking the Jesuit vows. as a requirement of the arduous Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order. It was through meditation that Hopkins achieved his particular philosophy, combining seemingly incompatible attitudes into a meaningful system. The incompatible attitudes mentioned are primarily those of his sensuous administration of beauty, and the frugal discipline of Christian faith. If he is a poet of tension, it is because of these two poles of his philosophy and poetry: aestheticism and asceticism. 

It is on this problem that the present study intends to focus.

A specification must be made, however, concerning the two alliterative though discrete terms in the title of his work. Aestheticism, an attitude often regarded as morally suspicious, will mean here G.M. Hopkins’s extraordinary sensitiveness to beauty, especially in Nature, the pursuit of the understanding of beauty and its origins, the Platonic worship of beauty as a manifestation of the divine. This ethereal yet sensuous capacity of Hopkins could have changed him into another of the whole series of precious late Victorian decadents, possibly a second Swinburne or even Wilde, were it not counterbalanced by his other inborn or/and acquired tendency. Asceticism, the mentioned balancing factor, also a suspect attitude - especially in modern times - will mean here the religious discipline, not so much of the body (though naturally important for Hopkins, a consequence of his nature and his vows: his biographers do not hesitate to use the term “prudery”) as of the mind, finding its basis in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A misunderstanding likely to occur at this point would be to present Hopkins as an aesthete by nature, with asceticism forced upon him by his vows. This “religion complex” has already been mentioned: the aim of this study, therefore, is to demonstrate the real relationship between aestheticism and asceticism in Hopkins , which is that of creative tension and coexistence, rather than inhibition and limitation.

The study will focus on selected poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, with additional material from his letters and prose (journals, sermons, etc). Also, quotations from works of major influence on Hopkins will be used to show the extent of their importance in the formation of the poet’s philosophy.