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Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life
An insightful and inspirational biography of the heroic and spiritual poet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins's descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies.
Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins's spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins's descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies.
Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins's spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2008
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February 15, 2019
I have loved Hopkins’ poems since my schooldays and could always recite a few from memory, albeit defectively. It is sad that I have left it for close to five decades to take the time out to try and understand them properly and perhaps appreciate them. Mariani provides a detailed, thorough and often beautifully written account of this poet’s life, explaining the context in which Hopkins produced each of his poems, describing and clarifying the content of each significant poem, often at generous length, and explaining the thinking and some of the interesting theory behind these extraordinary poems. Hopkins wrote as he did through the lens of his Catholic faith and it is helpful to suspend disbelief (or perhaps suspend hostility where applicable) at least long enough in order to see the world as he saw it, or as he expressed it in his poems. This is no more than we do, for example, when reading of the pagan gods in classical poetry, or for that matter when we find the tales of the Arabian Nights couched in the language of Islam. It is just not interesting to be diverted for long from the poetry in order to indulge in sectarian dispute. The achievement of this book is that the poetry of Hopkins is rendered accessible and meaningful in a way that I do not think is possible when reading the work without guidance.
What follows is quotes from the book.
He listens carefully to the speech inflections of his fellow Jesuits. Brother Wells, from the north country, for instance calls a grindstone a grindlestone. And geest, he sees, is simply the north country preterite of get. Brother Rickaby explains that “top is the higher, outer and lighter wood good for firing only, lop the stem and bigger boughs when the rest has been topped off used for timber.” ... And Brother Sidgreaves “has heard the high ridges of a field called folds and the hollow between the drip.” [p84]
Later that month, another gale force wind tumbles a “fine Spanish oak at the head of the path down the meadow,” then a large mulberry tree near a large cedar in St. Aloysius’ Walk comes crashing down “into the rye-grass field.” Hopkins watches – shaken – the “unending races of leaves ... leaping and raging along the meadow,” and notes the “hangers of smaller but barky branches, reminding him of nothing so much as ship-tackle.” Twenty years later this memory will shape shift into the image of “Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes”, which seem to “lace, lance and pair” in the “bright wind boisterous.” [p85]
He listens harder now to the actual speech of those who make up the community, the Anglo-Saxon and Irish of the language, rather than borrowing only from the literary classics and his Latin and Greek texts, and the lessons he is learning will serve him well in his own prose and poems.[p92]
Sunday, March 14, 1871: If for the past three years he has given up writing verse as incompatible with his vocation, certainly his journals have not gotten the message. In fact, they have become a way of writing a prose that captures in its language and rhythms the poetry he has foregone, lifting words to a new level of intensity and precision. “Bright morning, pied skies, hail,” he notes. As he walks out into the Lancashire countryside, he observes “water-runs in the sand of unusual delicacy and the broken blots of snow in the dead bents of the hedge-banks,” then the inner scaping of the scene, “which helped the eye over another hitherto disordered field of things.” [p98]
Offscapes, inscapes, landscapes, cloudscapes. [p101]
On July 28, his twenty-eighth birthday comes and goes. Studying for his exams in the Baddely, he comes across the medieval Franciscan, Duns Scotus’s, Sentences – in Latin – in the stacks and is “flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.” Haeceittas, thisness, individuation – that which makes this oak tree this oak tree only, or this rose this rose only, or this person this person only, and not another – something unique and separate, God’s infinite and incredible freshness of creation every nanosecond of every day, world without end. Thomism is fine for understanding the unity of all things – being, species, and so forth. But haeceittas – thisness – the dappled distinctiveness of everything kept in Creation. With that he can certainly indentify. [p110]
Still, his love of the Welsh landscape and its people and their language will bear fruit in the new rhythms and vibrant possibilities he can feel being grafted to the English stock he has mastered in his life in London and Oxford, along with his reading of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson. [p132]
...the editor has asked him first to “do away with the accents which mark the scanning.” He would have done without the accents gladly, he explains, if he thought his readers could “scan right unaided, though he knows they will not,” and if the lines “are not rightly scanned they are ruined.” He means to humour his editor but still, “some lines ... will have to be marked.” [p158]
... he did not “invent sprung rhythms but only sprung rhythm.” ... “single lines and single instances of it are not uncommon in English.”... What he has done – and is the first to have done – “is to enfranchise them as a regular, permanent principle of scansion.” And, he insists, even those “long, e.g. seven-syllabled, feet of the Deutschland, are strictly metrical.” ... for sprung rhythm depends solely on the number of stresses in a line, like the underlying accentual beat in Anglo-Saxon verse, whether there are one, two, three or even more unstressed syllables between accents. Or none. / But why use sprung rhythm at all? Because, Hopkins stresses, “it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining .. opposite and ... incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm – that is rhythm’s self – and, naturalness of expression.” The rhythm of speech itself, he means, because those rhythms are in and of themselves musical, and separated from a slavish reliance on traditional meters. In the long run, his verse is “less to be read than heard. It is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so ... I cannot think of altering anything.” [p185]
To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.” There are “hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets themselves,” and as a topic, several critics have mentioned it. He provides instances of the rhythm: “Dîng, dōng, bēll, Pūssy’s ĭn the wěll: whō pũt her īn? Līttle Jōhnny Thĭn. Whō pũlled her ōut? Lĭttle Jōhnny Stōut.” But no one, as far as Hopkins knows, “has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout,” even though he is convinced that it is “a better and more natural principle than the ordinary system, much more flexible and capable of much greater effects.” But when he submitted the poem to The Month, he had “to mark the stresses in blue chalk, and this and my rhymes carried on from one line into another and certain chimes suggested by the Welsh poetry I had been reading ... and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor’s eye,” so that the ode was ultimately rejected. [p208]
Any good poet or painter or composer will suggest a dark or light or sentimental or satiric mood, and a meaning – whether narrative, meditative, or even abstract. But there is something more that Hopkins is after: the inscape or distinctive pattern of a poem. As he said to Bridges: it is air and melody that he most looks for in music as it is design in painting and it is design or inscape that he aims for in poetry. He wants the forgěd feature, the abrūpt sělf that breaks through the poem, and which gives one a sense that a poem is distinctively, unmistably, one’s own:
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forgěd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrūpt sělf there so thrusts on, so thrōngs the ear. [p218]
... standing on a stool behind the lectern because he is that much shorter than the other preachers, ... [p241]
Like many of his co-religionists in 1880, Hopkins takes the Genesis story as historical narrative rather than as sacred myth. [p242]
After all, he insists, “not to love my university would be to undo the very buttons of my being ...” [p248]
...when he considers his selfbeing, his “consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself,” he continues, he finds it “more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man ... Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of ... distinctiveness ... this selfbeing of my own. Nothing, he sees now, “explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained, so far as the cases are like and do resemble.” Yet shen he searches nature, he can find no resemblance. He can taste the self “but at one tankard, that of my own being ... when I compare myself, my being – myself with anything else, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness; so that my knowledge of it, which is so intense, is from itself alone.” [p251]
He is “sweetly soothed” by his brother saying he could make anyone understand the poem [Eurydice] by reading it well. “That”, said Hopkins, “is what I always hoped, thought, and said: it is my precise aim”, for poetry is meant to be spoken and “until it is spoken it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself.” [p358]
He has come to believe that just as prose is capable of effects “more beautiful than any verse can attain, so perhaps the inflections and intonations of the speaking voice may give effects more beautiful than any attained by the fixed pitches of music.” And because that “depends entirely on living tradition,” it is now possible, with the recent invention of the phonograph, to have a living record “of fine spoken utterance,” for “the natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry,” which after all is speech, “has not been cultivated, and should be. When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it it would be .... a lovely art.” Then “each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song.” [p359]
Once again, he reminds Bridges how he is to read his new poem. That it is “made for performance” with a “loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on.” It should, in fact, “be almost sung” and has been “most carefully timed in tempo rubato.” [p371]
... “writing prose is easy and pleasant. Not so verse (though indeed such verse as I do compose is oral, made away from paper, and I put it down with repugnance).” [p377]
With a sense of relief, Hopkins adds that he has just turned “the last batch of examination work for this autumn (and if all were seen, fallen leaves of my poor life between all the leaves of it).” [p404]
What follows is quotes from the book.
He listens carefully to the speech inflections of his fellow Jesuits. Brother Wells, from the north country, for instance calls a grindstone a grindlestone. And geest, he sees, is simply the north country preterite of get. Brother Rickaby explains that “top is the higher, outer and lighter wood good for firing only, lop the stem and bigger boughs when the rest has been topped off used for timber.” ... And Brother Sidgreaves “has heard the high ridges of a field called folds and the hollow between the drip.” [p84]
Later that month, another gale force wind tumbles a “fine Spanish oak at the head of the path down the meadow,” then a large mulberry tree near a large cedar in St. Aloysius’ Walk comes crashing down “into the rye-grass field.” Hopkins watches – shaken – the “unending races of leaves ... leaping and raging along the meadow,” and notes the “hangers of smaller but barky branches, reminding him of nothing so much as ship-tackle.” Twenty years later this memory will shape shift into the image of “Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes”, which seem to “lace, lance and pair” in the “bright wind boisterous.” [p85]
He listens harder now to the actual speech of those who make up the community, the Anglo-Saxon and Irish of the language, rather than borrowing only from the literary classics and his Latin and Greek texts, and the lessons he is learning will serve him well in his own prose and poems.[p92]
Sunday, March 14, 1871: If for the past three years he has given up writing verse as incompatible with his vocation, certainly his journals have not gotten the message. In fact, they have become a way of writing a prose that captures in its language and rhythms the poetry he has foregone, lifting words to a new level of intensity and precision. “Bright morning, pied skies, hail,” he notes. As he walks out into the Lancashire countryside, he observes “water-runs in the sand of unusual delicacy and the broken blots of snow in the dead bents of the hedge-banks,” then the inner scaping of the scene, “which helped the eye over another hitherto disordered field of things.” [p98]
Offscapes, inscapes, landscapes, cloudscapes. [p101]
On July 28, his twenty-eighth birthday comes and goes. Studying for his exams in the Baddely, he comes across the medieval Franciscan, Duns Scotus’s, Sentences – in Latin – in the stacks and is “flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.” Haeceittas, thisness, individuation – that which makes this oak tree this oak tree only, or this rose this rose only, or this person this person only, and not another – something unique and separate, God’s infinite and incredible freshness of creation every nanosecond of every day, world without end. Thomism is fine for understanding the unity of all things – being, species, and so forth. But haeceittas – thisness – the dappled distinctiveness of everything kept in Creation. With that he can certainly indentify. [p110]
Still, his love of the Welsh landscape and its people and their language will bear fruit in the new rhythms and vibrant possibilities he can feel being grafted to the English stock he has mastered in his life in London and Oxford, along with his reading of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson. [p132]
...the editor has asked him first to “do away with the accents which mark the scanning.” He would have done without the accents gladly, he explains, if he thought his readers could “scan right unaided, though he knows they will not,” and if the lines “are not rightly scanned they are ruined.” He means to humour his editor but still, “some lines ... will have to be marked.” [p158]
... he did not “invent sprung rhythms but only sprung rhythm.” ... “single lines and single instances of it are not uncommon in English.”... What he has done – and is the first to have done – “is to enfranchise them as a regular, permanent principle of scansion.” And, he insists, even those “long, e.g. seven-syllabled, feet of the Deutschland, are strictly metrical.” ... for sprung rhythm depends solely on the number of stresses in a line, like the underlying accentual beat in Anglo-Saxon verse, whether there are one, two, three or even more unstressed syllables between accents. Or none. / But why use sprung rhythm at all? Because, Hopkins stresses, “it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining .. opposite and ... incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm – that is rhythm’s self – and, naturalness of expression.” The rhythm of speech itself, he means, because those rhythms are in and of themselves musical, and separated from a slavish reliance on traditional meters. In the long run, his verse is “less to be read than heard. It is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so ... I cannot think of altering anything.” [p185]
To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.” There are “hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets themselves,” and as a topic, several critics have mentioned it. He provides instances of the rhythm: “Dîng, dōng, bēll, Pūssy’s ĭn the wěll: whō pũt her īn? Līttle Jōhnny Thĭn. Whō pũlled her ōut? Lĭttle Jōhnny Stōut.” But no one, as far as Hopkins knows, “has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout,” even though he is convinced that it is “a better and more natural principle than the ordinary system, much more flexible and capable of much greater effects.” But when he submitted the poem to The Month, he had “to mark the stresses in blue chalk, and this and my rhymes carried on from one line into another and certain chimes suggested by the Welsh poetry I had been reading ... and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor’s eye,” so that the ode was ultimately rejected. [p208]
Any good poet or painter or composer will suggest a dark or light or sentimental or satiric mood, and a meaning – whether narrative, meditative, or even abstract. But there is something more that Hopkins is after: the inscape or distinctive pattern of a poem. As he said to Bridges: it is air and melody that he most looks for in music as it is design in painting and it is design or inscape that he aims for in poetry. He wants the forgěd feature, the abrūpt sělf that breaks through the poem, and which gives one a sense that a poem is distinctively, unmistably, one’s own:
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forgěd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrūpt sělf there so thrusts on, so thrōngs the ear. [p218]
... standing on a stool behind the lectern because he is that much shorter than the other preachers, ... [p241]
Like many of his co-religionists in 1880, Hopkins takes the Genesis story as historical narrative rather than as sacred myth. [p242]
After all, he insists, “not to love my university would be to undo the very buttons of my being ...” [p248]
...when he considers his selfbeing, his “consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself,” he continues, he finds it “more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man ... Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of ... distinctiveness ... this selfbeing of my own. Nothing, he sees now, “explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained, so far as the cases are like and do resemble.” Yet shen he searches nature, he can find no resemblance. He can taste the self “but at one tankard, that of my own being ... when I compare myself, my being – myself with anything else, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness; so that my knowledge of it, which is so intense, is from itself alone.” [p251]
He is “sweetly soothed” by his brother saying he could make anyone understand the poem [Eurydice] by reading it well. “That”, said Hopkins, “is what I always hoped, thought, and said: it is my precise aim”, for poetry is meant to be spoken and “until it is spoken it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself.” [p358]
He has come to believe that just as prose is capable of effects “more beautiful than any verse can attain, so perhaps the inflections and intonations of the speaking voice may give effects more beautiful than any attained by the fixed pitches of music.” And because that “depends entirely on living tradition,” it is now possible, with the recent invention of the phonograph, to have a living record “of fine spoken utterance,” for “the natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry,” which after all is speech, “has not been cultivated, and should be. When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it it would be .... a lovely art.” Then “each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song.” [p359]
Once again, he reminds Bridges how he is to read his new poem. That it is “made for performance” with a “loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on.” It should, in fact, “be almost sung” and has been “most carefully timed in tempo rubato.” [p371]
... “writing prose is easy and pleasant. Not so verse (though indeed such verse as I do compose is oral, made away from paper, and I put it down with repugnance).” [p377]
With a sense of relief, Hopkins adds that he has just turned “the last batch of examination work for this autumn (and if all were seen, fallen leaves of my poor life between all the leaves of it).” [p404]
November 25, 2019
I had read Mariani's biographies of Williams, Berryman and Lowell, rich and complicated lives, so was a little puzzled by a 500 page biography of Hopkins. Afterall, for all I knew, Hopkins, beside writing his difficult poems, had done only a couple of things in his life -- convert to Catholicism and then become a priest who did whatever the Jesuits told him to do. And at the end, I was right about that.
Mariani is clearly a devout man. The book is dedicated to the son who shares his name, and after the name comes an S.J.! So Mariani's own child is a Jesuit! Much of this book becomes more than Christian apologetics. It is Catholic, even Jesuit apologetics. That becomes heavy handed for a nonbeliever, even one who realizes how important these statements of faith are for an understanding of Hopkins poems. It is a measure of his passion that Mariani almost overcomes the bedrock of my prejudice.
But Mariani was very good in making absolutely clear that Hopkins experiments in versification were separate from his intentionally tortured syntax, his invented and compound words, that occasionally overwhelming alliteration. That made the reading easier for me, and I was able to move more easily in the poems. I read my old Penguin Poets edition of Hopkins while reading this big biography, and that process was revealing.
In the end I was very moved by the life. Hopkins last words -- I am so happy! I am so happy! -- may sound a bit more desperate to my ear than they do to Mariani's, but after a life of physical denial, of being forced to live in places where he didn't want to live, unhealthy places that ultimately killed him, and doing work he didn't value and couldn't convince himself was of any value, yet in small moments snatching difficult language out of the air, language that wouldn't find its readership for another 50 years, after all that, those words were gut-wrenching.
Mariani is clearly a devout man. The book is dedicated to the son who shares his name, and after the name comes an S.J.! So Mariani's own child is a Jesuit! Much of this book becomes more than Christian apologetics. It is Catholic, even Jesuit apologetics. That becomes heavy handed for a nonbeliever, even one who realizes how important these statements of faith are for an understanding of Hopkins poems. It is a measure of his passion that Mariani almost overcomes the bedrock of my prejudice.
But Mariani was very good in making absolutely clear that Hopkins experiments in versification were separate from his intentionally tortured syntax, his invented and compound words, that occasionally overwhelming alliteration. That made the reading easier for me, and I was able to move more easily in the poems. I read my old Penguin Poets edition of Hopkins while reading this big biography, and that process was revealing.
In the end I was very moved by the life. Hopkins last words -- I am so happy! I am so happy! -- may sound a bit more desperate to my ear than they do to Mariani's, but after a life of physical denial, of being forced to live in places where he didn't want to live, unhealthy places that ultimately killed him, and doing work he didn't value and couldn't convince himself was of any value, yet in small moments snatching difficult language out of the air, language that wouldn't find its readership for another 50 years, after all that, those words were gut-wrenching.
December 18, 2025
(all books get 5 stars) Phew that was a long haul. Mariani's admiration and love for Hopkins (and the Catholic faith) are apparent. He clearly understands Hopkins' spirituality and how it dominates his poetry. The book suffers from the absolute mass of detail, however, which obscures Mariani's insights. It is nearly impossible to wade through all the obscure references, random thoughts, and petty details of Hopkins' day to day life, not to mention the singular Catholic lens which, I felt, was obscuring my picture of Hopkins considerably. (His disputed sexuality, for example, is glossed over and his attraction to men attributed as innocence.) I gave up about halfway through and began skimming. What I did get, however, is the portrait of a genius, a beautiful, kind soul who suffered physically and spiritually and was absolutely devoted to his faith. His poetry was astounding and far ahead of its time. You can't help feeling sad that he never knew how beloved it would become.
January 1, 2010
When I was in high school, we studied poetry every spring in our English class. At some point I became fascinated with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a passionate Catholic, who created some of his own language for poetry. Recently, then, I heard about this new biography of Hopkins & decided to read it. It's an unusual book: The author idolizes Hopkins & also think that everything he did is fascinating. The author had access to letters & diaries, so we get sometimes almost a day-by-day account of Hopkins' life - more details than most readers would necessarily want to know. The author also shares Hopkins' passionate Catholicism & sometimes injects his own religious fervor into the biography. I can't honestly recommend this book to others, but I did enjoy it myself!
March 15, 2021
One of our greatest poets, and a life-long favorite, one justly served with this outstanding biography following Mariani’s forty years of diligent research and writing. There have been many other studies devoted to Hopkin’s genius, and, deservedly so (works by Kitchen, Martin, White and Lahey), but this latest “study that reads like a novel” is among the finest. Hopkins poetry lives on in many ways. His knack for wordplay, poetic rhythm, alliteration, and experiments with language anticipate E. E. Cummings; and his dense hammering, melodic thundering pulse anticipates the singular poetic verse of Dylan Thomas. Highly recommended. See also: “Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life” by Robert Bernard Martin.”
July 19, 2021
It is striking how well Mariani replicates Hopkins own thoughts and language. I'm sure this is partly due to his continual use of Hopkins' own letters and other writings to tell the poet's story.
The biography is packed with details down to the day (there were few cases in which I felt the reading was a tad tedious). Mariani's work ultimately made me feel I glimpsed, in some way, a little of Hopkins' inner life, his inscape.
The biography is packed with details down to the day (there were few cases in which I felt the reading was a tad tedious). Mariani's work ultimately made me feel I glimpsed, in some way, a little of Hopkins' inner life, his inscape.
June 30, 2018
Mariani's careful weaving of Hopkins's biography, letters, and poems as well as exposition and a bit of literary criticism, along with Mariani's deft prose makes this a terrific literary biography. More, it provides insight into the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, deepening their already profound impact.
July 3, 2018
A shame some have found this work cold. I cried. I thought this book was as beautiful a tribute as Hopkins' poems themselves. Mariani also has a way with words that I find transporting. I cried at the end, even knowing, as all biographies must, end in the death of our hero. Tears are true praise, indeed.
August 10, 2019
Profoundly moving.
March 1, 2015
I won't be the same again after reading this. This book managed to collapse the span of time separating the present from the space within which Hopkins walked. I can't say, unlike many other books I've read, that I feel like I could imagine sitting across from this poet to have a chat. I felt, rather, that I could only watch him as he moved increasingly beyond my comprehension, but not respect. How fortunate I was to stumble across this man, and how odd that the most incredible parts of him exist in obscurity. It appears too, that everyone who really knew him was changed for it, while for most others, he passed like a humble shadow before them unrecognized.
I love this book for resurrecting Father Hopkins in a way which allows him, even now, to stand clearly before my mind's eye. A fellow Jesuit remarked about him that he was an odd man and recalled observing, one late afternoon, Hopkins on his knees trying to get a better look at the way the sunlight sparkled over the stones in the courtyard. He mentioned that Hopkins was often found standing before one of the large windows in the novitiate house looking out onto the moon, or a sunset. These images will never loose themselves from my own mind. Neither will the Hopkins, who in the latter years of his life, realized he could no longer discern beauty in nature as he once did, that it no longer sang to him. During this time is poetry turned to his own inscape and descended to levels of pain and grief that is difficult to read. Yet, incredibly these poems are still tinged with a joy that, like dappled things, creates a Beauty that transcends beauty.
I look affectionately on Hopkins and his eccentricities. One such that the Jesuits frowned on was his habit of returning back to his room through the window (because it was shorter than going around) when returning to his quarters after he was through teaching. Or, teetering along a steep rooftop after a fellow professors escaped monkey. The picture of a priest balancing along a rooftop behind a screeching monkey would stay long with the people who witnessed it. In his younger years he was strong and attacked many a hill and mountain with vigor, he was sparkling and hilarious. It is hard to understand the darkness that was thrown upon him later in his life and the physical suffering he endured with little to no complaint.
Most of all, it was his steadfast iron strength and resolve which is so entirely incomprehensible. So few really pick up their cross to follow Christ. I suppose that's what makes this read, and the man, a bit frightening; he make my own weakness terrifyingly apparent.
I love this book for resurrecting Father Hopkins in a way which allows him, even now, to stand clearly before my mind's eye. A fellow Jesuit remarked about him that he was an odd man and recalled observing, one late afternoon, Hopkins on his knees trying to get a better look at the way the sunlight sparkled over the stones in the courtyard. He mentioned that Hopkins was often found standing before one of the large windows in the novitiate house looking out onto the moon, or a sunset. These images will never loose themselves from my own mind. Neither will the Hopkins, who in the latter years of his life, realized he could no longer discern beauty in nature as he once did, that it no longer sang to him. During this time is poetry turned to his own inscape and descended to levels of pain and grief that is difficult to read. Yet, incredibly these poems are still tinged with a joy that, like dappled things, creates a Beauty that transcends beauty.
I look affectionately on Hopkins and his eccentricities. One such that the Jesuits frowned on was his habit of returning back to his room through the window (because it was shorter than going around) when returning to his quarters after he was through teaching. Or, teetering along a steep rooftop after a fellow professors escaped monkey. The picture of a priest balancing along a rooftop behind a screeching monkey would stay long with the people who witnessed it. In his younger years he was strong and attacked many a hill and mountain with vigor, he was sparkling and hilarious. It is hard to understand the darkness that was thrown upon him later in his life and the physical suffering he endured with little to no complaint.
Most of all, it was his steadfast iron strength and resolve which is so entirely incomprehensible. So few really pick up their cross to follow Christ. I suppose that's what makes this read, and the man, a bit frightening; he make my own weakness terrifyingly apparent.
October 1, 2013
As a personal, religious, and literary portrait of a resolutely obscure poet, this is an unusual book and a rather qualified success. I am a great admirer of Hopkins' verse and I am interested in his religious itinerary, but yet I found much of the book's first half to be somewhat distant. It was tempting at times to imagine that one might see more deeply into Hopkins' life by reading his poems over again along with some of his letters and sermons (excerpts of all three, with interpretation, accounting for a great deal of Mariani's account). This changed for me in the book's second half, as Hopkins' relationships with Robert Bridges and Richard Dixon become more elaborate and poetically charged and as his own poetry becomes more precise and mature. Somehow the deeply depressed and disappointed late-life Hopkins comes alive on the page more readily than the younger, more idealistic incarnation.
It is hardly a plaster portrait. Despite Mariani's evident sympathy for both his subject and his subject's religious vocation, it is hard not to see in Hopkins' refusal to publish his work in his lifetime something less like holy humility and more like a prideful fear of critique and misunderstanding. A resentful, disciplinary streak runs though Hopkins' attitude toward the world. His endless self-sacrifice offered fewer and fewer epiphanies and moments of consolation as time went on. Yet Mariani's admiration both for what Hopkins accomplished (obviously) and what he gave his life for (less obviously) is well established and earned in the telling.
The book left me with two extraneous observations. First, there is an odd narcissism of the age when it comes to literary disputes. Hopkins despised Walt Whitman's work on religious and philosophical grounds (to the point of minimizing the evident debt he owed to Whitman), but in hindsight the two are clearly of the same party, so to say. And second, there is the paradox that the one who strives most to build himself up in virtue must rely more and more on God's gratuitous love as he does.
It is hardly a plaster portrait. Despite Mariani's evident sympathy for both his subject and his subject's religious vocation, it is hard not to see in Hopkins' refusal to publish his work in his lifetime something less like holy humility and more like a prideful fear of critique and misunderstanding. A resentful, disciplinary streak runs though Hopkins' attitude toward the world. His endless self-sacrifice offered fewer and fewer epiphanies and moments of consolation as time went on. Yet Mariani's admiration both for what Hopkins accomplished (obviously) and what he gave his life for (less obviously) is well established and earned in the telling.
The book left me with two extraneous observations. First, there is an odd narcissism of the age when it comes to literary disputes. Hopkins despised Walt Whitman's work on religious and philosophical grounds (to the point of minimizing the evident debt he owed to Whitman), but in hindsight the two are clearly of the same party, so to say. And second, there is the paradox that the one who strives most to build himself up in virtue must rely more and more on God's gratuitous love as he does.
January 1, 2012
This poet biography wasn’t quite the artsy-cool one that the Shelley biography was—it was more conventional, but Mariani’s style is different from what I imagine traditional biographies are like. It’s sequence of the salient events that make up the life of G.M. Hopkins. Most interesting I found was that Hopkins was virtually unpublished in his lifetime—that he even resisted it. Mariani starts elsewhere than Hopkins’ birth, choosing to indentify the time around his 21st birthday that he decided to leave Anglicanism and convert to Catholocism. Being the benchmark event of his life, Mariani makes the rest of the life obedient to that choice, and in every way he is right to do so. I rather liked reading about some of the struggles Hopkins had towards the end, and in reading this book in preparation to complete a research project I think I got what I was looking for. I definitely stuck to the schedule I set to myself better this time than the last—I guess I’m growing as a graduate student.
December 21, 2016
What amazes me most about this book is the way Paul Mariani adapts the cadences and vocabulary of Hopkins's own writing to tell the poet's story. He weaves in details from Hopkins's poems and letters, as well as quotes; but he goes beyond this to approach Hopkins's own style without coming off forced. It makes for intricate reading at times, but I find it a beautiful tribute to Hopkins. I also think Mariani is a great person to tell this poet's story, because he has such respect for his devotion and shows over and over again his familiarity and appreciation for the theological ideas and spiritual goals that drove Hopkins. He clearly immersed himself in Hopkins' journals and letters.
When I read about Hopkins's death, at the end, I was so moved I cried. I think this too says something for this book.
When I read about Hopkins's death, at the end, I was so moved I cried. I think this too says something for this book.
November 1, 2012
The book was very well researched and provided much information of Hopkins. However it seemed to almost prefer to focus on the issues of poetry, especially in Hopkins world, than on the poet himself. The very poignant and profound humanity and faith of this man, expressed in his poetry was seemingly veiled. Perhaps there is a reticence in acknowledging the reality and issues with which Hopkins struggled yet to honestly explore them is to only give opportunity to truly understand and appreciate this man of true faith and courage.
May 13, 2010
See my analysis of this biography in the the 2009 Magill's Literary Annual. Mariani's telling of the poet / priest's life balances Hopkin's commitment to faith and the responsibilities of his office with his love of language and skill as a poet. This approach has never been as fully implemented as it is in this volume because few literary critics have recognized the demands of priesthood as well as Mariani who is an active Catholic devotee (and poet) himself.
Want to read
July 16, 2009When I was at BYU, I decided that I would do my Masters Thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins. I never did, but I still am intrigued by the man and his poetry. I picked this up during a day trip to the Salt Lake City main library and read bits and pieces. Of course, no card to check it out, but I'll look for it later in a more local library.
March 28, 2016
Wow - this is one of the best written, best researched books I've ever read. Mr. Mariani clearly had a passion for documenting Hopkins' life in complete detail. It took me 6 months to read this book, but it was well worth it.
July 3, 2018
I thought this book was as beautiful a tribute as Hopkins' poems themselves. Mariani also has a way with words that I find transporting. I cried at the end, even knowing, as all biographies must, end in the death of our hero. Tears are true praise, indeed.
Want to read
November 8, 2008Reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post Book World (Nov. 2, 2008.)
Want to read
November 13, 2008I've always enjoyed Hopkins' writing style and the impromptu words. This looks like an engaging book about the stories behind him and the poetry.
November 17, 2009
This biographer ...so far... is right on! I cried at the end. Such a hard life, but such a great poet.
May 1, 2012
An incredibly in-depth biography of my favorite poet.
January 14, 2016
Embarrassingly giddy, but comprehensive.
May 12, 2016
This is a very full chronological biography, whereby Mariani lets the structure of Hopkins' life unfold the poetry.
April 12, 2012
An interesting account of this priest & poet. No groundbreaking revelations here.
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