Book REVIEW:

HOPEFUL HOPKINS: ESSAYS:
Desmond Egan.

The Goldsmith Press, 2017. xv + 120 pp. $25.00.

Professor Alex Assaly,
Cambridge University, UK.
Published The James Joyce Quarterly 2020

On 18 February 1884, Gerard Manley Hopkins moved to Dublin to assume the positions of Professor of Classics at University College and Fellow of the Royal University of Dublin. Although Hopkins was “warmly welcomed and most kindly treated” upon his arrival, he found Dublin “a joyless place.”1

Dislocated from his homeland, his Jesuit province, his friends, and his family, Hopkins found himself a “stranger,” as he would write in one of his “sonnets of desolation,”2 stuck “at a third/Remove.”3 His middle- to upper-class English accent (cultivated in Hampstead and Oxford), his frail body, his sensitivity, and his reputation as a “detached aesthete” and an “eccentric” pitted him as an outsider among the largely working class and politically charged Irish.4 His feelings of isolation were only made worse by bouts of ill-health, “jaded[ness],” and the “severe work” of marking examination papers and delivering lectures (Correspondence 690).

The image of a sickly and depressed Jesuit poet, wasting away in a decrepit Dublin, has become the dominant representation of Hopkins in his final years. In a description of Norman White’s book Hopkins in Ireland on the University College Dublin Press website, a commentator went so far as to say that Hopkins was “a sick and self-lacerating human being.”5

Yet is such a representation accurate? Did Hopkins not have another side to him during those years? Desmond Egan’s new collection of essays, Hopeful Hopkins: Essays, emphatically confirms the existence of the “other, more characteristic side[s]” of Hopkins’s personality (31): his unwavering belief, his humor, his faith in poetic language, his energy, and his hopefulness. With an acute sympathy for Hopkins’s belief in Christianity and the “sacred function of poetry” (19),

Egan makes a successful gesture at uncovering Hopkins’s complex and paradoxical personality and, in turn, at bringing his late poems into their proper frame of emotional, linguistic, and thematic reference. In the opening essay of Hopeful Hopkins, Egan makes his most extended defense of the collection’s thesis. Why, he inquires, have writers like John Keats, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, and Samuel Beckett—all melancholic in their temperaments—not suffered the same fate as Hopkins? Why has only Hopkins been considered “essentially” depressed (17)?

While Egan acknowledges Hopkins’s physical and mental sensitivity, in Dublin and elsewhere, he believes that the “gloom-gang” as he calls those commentators who have labeled Hopkins a “neurotic” and “depressive,” have failed to consider the poet in light of his beliefs and accomplishments (20).

Hopkins produced almost one-third of his poetic output while living in Dublin

During his years in Dublin, for one, he engaged in musical composition, sketched, and undertook a number of scholarly projects (including a book on Greek meter and various contributions to Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (6), and he labored over his work as a professor and a fellow.

He also put a similar sort of energy into his correspondences and relationships. In a letter to his sister, which begins “Im intoirely ashamed o meself,” for example, Hopkins mimics the Hiberno-English spoken in Dublin with an intelligence and wit that reveals his willingness to be both intimate and playful (26, 58-59, Correspondence 701-02).

Egan argues that Hopkins’s productivity and humor are indicative of a “positive disposition” that not only resists the terms of “depression” and “despair,” but are also “related to belief in a Superior Being” (19, 28). At the heart of Egan’s argument lies a conviction that Hopkins’s commentators have not been properly sympathetic to him in terms of his faith. If they had been, they would know that Christianity accepts a certain paradoxical understanding of the relationship between denial and affirmation, despair and hope. Spiritual, mental, and physical suffering, Egan insists, can, in fact, be redemptive or “conducive to holiness” (20). Hopkins certainly would have felt this to be true. In his spiritual notebook, he writes, “Man was created to praise . . . and the other things on earth— . . . weakness, ill health, every cross, is a help” (21).

According to Egan, Hopkins never wavered in his faith nor in his vocation and, no matter the fragmentation of his physical and mental persona, his understanding of the universe “ultimately had a coherence because it had a Creator” (97). As a poet himself, Egan uses language with a familiarity and ease that are both the book’s strongest and weakest points. At its weakest, Egan’s essays devolve into colloquialism and opinion, which have the effect of shifting their tone from the scholarly to the conversational (although it should be noted that some of these essays were written to be delivered at the annual Hopkins Festival, which Egan organizes). His insistence on knowing the “real Hopkins” (27), for example, and his defense of the Jesuit poet against all forms of detraction (he states that any critic of Hopkins has simply misunderstood his genius) are, perhaps, overly confident assertions, which put Hopkins in the hands of an apparently enlightened coterie of readers.

At the same time, Egan’s familiar tone is one of the collection’s most interesting dimensions. Like T. S. Eliot’s essay on Joyce or Geoffrey Hill’s on Ivor Gurney, Egan’s writings on Hopkins are compelling in the way that they reveal as much about Egan as they do about Hopkins.7 Egan’s point of view reveals itself most prominently in his assertions about the nature of art and the creative process. In the essay “Hopeful Hopkins,” for example, Egan defends the Jesuit poet’s “positive disposition” by making the claim that art is “fundamentally positive” (19, 18). “[A]rt,” he writes, “represents some kind of assertion of life against the overwhelming fact of death” (17).

In a later essay, “Neurosis, Hopkins, and Art,” Egan makes a similar gesture, stating that art involves “mov[ing] beyond individual hurt to some perception of universal truth” or, in other terms, facing life head on, “pierc[ing]” its “false values,” and affirming its ultimately coherence (69, 73, 71).

In this regard, art is cathartic, kenotic, or therapeutic: it releases the artist and his or her audience from the world’s falsities and has him, her, or them dwell on the Word instead.

While statements about the nature and function of art may be totalizing, they are only so convincing by having come from the same hand that wrote “Mystery Which I Never Want to Solve” and “Peace.”8 Other than Hopeful Hopkins and Neurosis, Hopkins, and Art, the essays in Hopeful Hopkins largely explore two sub-themes: Hopkins’s interest in language and modern poets’ interest in Hopkins’s language.

In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Egan closely reads one of Hopkins’s most famous poem, drawing particular attention to the way Hopkins was sensitive to the concreteness of his language, the metaphorical reach of his images, and his interest in classical Greek syntax and Welsh form. Similarly, “Hopkins and Hiberno-English” is an essay that finds Hopkins implicitly understanding the influence of the Irish language (Irish-ness being another theme that runs through Hopeful Hopkins) on modern English. Almost in an act of self-awareness, Egan is at his most acute when he discusses the ways in which poets engage in dialogue with one another. In “Hopkins and the Modernists,” Egan surveys the opinions of Hopkins’s poetry by William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, dwelling particularly on Pound, whom Egan claims misread Hopkins on the basis of a modernist bias against Victorian aestheticism and, equally, a prejudice against his religiosity (39).

Although Egan slightly overstates his claim (he only skims over Herbert Read and W. H. Auden’s interest in Hopkins and forgets to mention Hopkins’s place in studies like Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry or poems like David Jones’s In Parenthesis9), his essay does get at the way Hopkins has suffered from frequent misrepresentation and deficient reading. In “James Joyce and Hopkins,” Egan further explores the relation between Ireland’s Jesuit-educated poet and novelist and the Jesuit poet who spent his last years in Dublin. In one of the most interesting notes in Hopeful Hopkins, Egan finds echoes of Hopkins’s poetry in Finnegans Wake, recording clear resonances of “The Windhover” in the line “[w]hile the dapplegray dawn drags nearing nigh for to wake all droners that 3 drowse in Dublin” (37, 85, FW 585.20-21).10

Hopeful Hopkins ends with the elegiac essay “James McKenna and Hopkins.” In celebration of McKenna’s artistic life, Egan recalls the sympathy McKenna had for the spirit of Hopkins and describes the ways McKenna captured that spirit in his “Hopkins Monument” and his dramatic rendering of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”11 At the end of the essay, Egan, contemplating the legacies of both artists, writes, “The best work of each will survive, perhaps for as long as human yearning does. And human hope” (109).

Although I cannot speak for James McKenna, I can say with some confidence that Hopkins and his work are far from being consigned to oblivion. Hopeful Hopkins, along with Father Joseph J. Feeney’s The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Michael Hurley’s “Passion and Playfulness in the Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” to name a select few, are just parts—important though they may be—of what Catherine Phillips once called “a new phase in Hopkins studies”: a phase of scholarship sensitive to and appreciative of Hopkins’s complexity and, more than ever, willing to find a coherence between his “desolation” and his famous last words: “I am so happy, I am so happy” (32).12

NOTES

1 See Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Volume II: Correspondence 1882-1889, ed. R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), p. 662. Further references will by cited parenthetically in the text as Correspondence.

2 Hopkins wrote a series of poems, including “To Seem the Stranger,” “I Wake and Feel,” “No Worst,” “Carrion Comfort,” “Patience, Hard Thing,” and “My Own Heart,” which have come to be known as his “sonnets of desolation” or “terrible sonnets”—see Hilary E. Pearson, “The ‘Terrible Sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spirituality of Depression,” The Way, 46 (9 January 2007), 23.

3 Hopkins, “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life,” The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 181. 4 Norman White, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 382. 5 See White, Hopkins in Ireland (Dublin: Univ. College Dublin Press, 2002),

6 There are actually no traces of Hopkins’s book on Greek metre. He undertook a number of scholarly projects, but most of them were never finished. In “Hopkins in Ireland,” White writes, “Often in 1887 and 1888 letters occurs. pathetic and ultimately ironic juxtaposition of other authors’ finished, published work with Hopkins’s own never published or completed projects: his work on Greek metre from the Dorian measure to metre in general, a book on ‘Statistics and Free Will, [and others].

6.He had planned also to write on Greek negatives, and on Patmore’s long poem The Angel in the House. The diversity of these projects suggests unreality and lack of focus” (p. 171). See Joseph Wright, ed., English Dialect Dictionary (London: Henry Froude, 1898-1905).

7. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber Publishers, 1975), pp. 175-78, and Geoffrey Hill, “Gurney’s ‘Hobby,’ Geoffrey Hill: Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 424-47.

8 Desmond Egan, “Mystery Which I Never Want to Solve,” and “Peace,” Selected Poems (Omaha: Creighton Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 99, 143.

9 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: W. Heinemann, 1927), and David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber Publishers, 1937). See also Jones, “Essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, c. 1968,” David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose, ed. Thomas Berenato et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018), pp. 101-267.

10 Hopkins, “The Windhover,” The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 144.

12 Father Joseph J. Feeney, The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishers, 2008), and Michael Hurley, “Passion and Playfulness in the Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 141-54.
See also Catherine Phillips,