World as Word

The arresting poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins arises from philosophical engagement with the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other mysteries of Christian revelation. No previous study has explored his poetry in the light of his philosophical theology. Hopkins's thoughts on justice and language challenge today's inhuman literary theories. With explications of more than twenty-nine of Hopkins's intricate poems and difficult prose, this study traces Hopkins's engagement with his age. New, philosophically rigorous definitions of Hopkins's key poetic terms - ""inscape"" and ""instress"" - detail exactly how he discovered the possibility of multiple true concepts of things, each grounded in reality but demanding the participation of the moral will. Doubt of the possibility of historical truth drove many Victorians to scientism or vague religious sentimentalism. Hopkins asserted that humans physically can and morally must learn truth. Haunted by a sense that experience is incommunicably singular, and aware that culture and consciousness shape history, he found support in the personalist religious epistemology of John Henry Newman. On it Hopkins formed his poetics, later enriched by John Duns Scotus's communitarian theory of justice in language. Scotus deeply influenced Hopkins's idea of poetry, coloring not only his arguments and images but the metrical and verbal music of his style. Lovers of Hopkins's poetry will find a deeper understanding of his music; philosophers will find an epistemology and aesthetics worthy of respect. Students of literature will find a challenging theory of the relationship between linguistic structures and the world of experience. In today's intellectual environment, which treats the notion of truth as a cynical tool of politics, and deception as inherent in language, Hopkins's luminous vision of sacrificial love and community at the heart of poetry offers a refreshing antidote to the dry suspicions of a cademic literary theory.