I know I've blogged before about Gerard Manley Hopkins, but he's always worth remembering. He'd already become an interest of mine before I had ever studied him in school. A lot of his poems were basically sonnets, but they had a different kind of rhythm, one suited to expressing his feelings on God and the world of nature.
Hopkins didn't want to be famous as a poet. He didn't want to be famous as anything, and for a long time actually stopped writing verse. This is justifiable given his calling as a priest, an ideally humble and self-effacing profession. Of course the world would be a poorer place without his poetry. Posthumous publication was perhaps the best compromise.
His friend Robert Bridges was the primary mover of that publication, at a time when Bridges himself had attained the position of Britain's Poet Laureate. But his younger sisters Kate and Grace had something to do with his revival as well. This is nice to know, and they seem to have been quite the creative family.
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Not only did Gerard Manley Hopkins become estranged from his family and a number of friends when he converted to Catholicism but he also made a bonfire of all the poems he'd written up until then. It was interesting that he visited Switzerland before becoming a Jesuit because that country refused entry to Jesuits. You can tell I've been back to wikipedia besides reading your Poetry Foundation account. What interested me too was to read that he allowed himself to take up writing poetry again after reading Duns Scotus and seeing that religion and poetry did not conflict.
So who is this Duns Scotus I wondered as I followed a link to another big page about him - 14th century philosopher of multiple disciplines. One subject he discussed at length was the question of the metaphysical proof of God's infinite existence. Another that interested me was his reasoning for his belief that Mary as the Mother of Jesus had also been born by Immaculate Conception. The page about him is thoroughly fascinating.
Gerard Manly Hopkins loved Old English and I can see by having read several of his poems just how right he was in thinking the language has degraded over time. Thank goodness he had such a friend as Robert Bridges and the love of his sisters to save his work for us.
Yes, conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism and vice versa was still very serious business in the Victorian Era, something that could disrupt a family's life. The distinctions don't seem to mean the same thing to people anymore. In any case it had to have taken a real dedication for him to decide to become a Jesuit. (Interesting about Switzerland banning Jesuits, but that country was at an odd juncture in the religious wars.) It's a shame all his earlier verse was destroyed, even if it's hard to imagine having the same impact as the later stuff. Duns Scotus was an interesting thinker in his own right, and developed the idea of haecceity--the particular "thisness" of a thing--which I've always confused with quiddity.
Duns Scotus was also a somewhat mysterious character, if only because the biographical details of most people from that era outside of royalty have been forgotten. The portrait of him on the Wikipedia page is from a couple of centuries after his death. Still, his words and thoughts survive, and are quite interesting.
That's right, he wrote to Bridges about his love for Old English and its superiority. It's almost impossible for us to imagine using English today without the Norman influence it's had for almost 1,000 years, yet early Medieval English did have an amazing expressiveness. I'm glad of both Bridges and the sisters.
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