Gerard manley hopkins’ fascination with individuals and individual differences, with particularities, with ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’ (P37), is one of the best known and most commented on features of his mind and art. This fascination comes to a head in his intense and often agonizing preoccupation with the human self, the ‘I’ that each person knows, ‘this kínd, this kéen self-feeling’ (P152), and that each person knows as unique and induplicable, accessible directly only to the one who utters this particular ‘I’ – ‘Self ín self, steepèd, and páshed’ (P61), the most particular of all...

Like all human beings, Gerard Manley Hopkins was the product of his own times. This fact was long obscured, since his fame has all been posthumous, and even belatedly posthumous. His poetry first came to public attention simultaneously with that of the post-World War I creators of ‘modern poetry’ and was coopted into their achievement, where it fitted convincingly. Recent scholarship has had to correct or supplement early impressions so as to make clear how truly Victorian Hopkins was.

InGerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper, Alison Sulloway has expertly summed up some major points of correspondence between Hopkins...

Hopkins’ consciousness of self was fed not only out of the Victorian milieu generally, but also by certain elements in the ascetical tradition in which he lived from the time he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice at the age of twenty-four. The ascetical tradition of the Society of Jesus is at the root no more than the Christian ascetical tradition, as are the ascetical traditions of other Catholic religious orders, Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican, and others. Religious orders seek approval of the Church, in effect, to receive assurance that their aims and way of life accord with the...

The exercises were not the only element in Hopkins’ training as a Jesuit that fed Victorian particularism and self-consciousness. The Catholic theology that Hopkins studied in his regular courses preparatory to the priesthood, together with the philosophy propaedeutic to this theology, penetrated his entire life, from his direct ministerial work as a priest (daily celebration of Mass, preaching, hearing confessions), through his work of teaching and his poetry and prose writings. Some knowledge of the philosophy and theology he studied and of their setting is essential if one is to understand the man and to hear what he is saying....

Hopkins’ resolute confrontation of the self situates him in a consciousness-raising movement that had been in progress for thousands of years. Self-consciousness, in all its human existential intimacy, had registered all through history wherever a human being could say ‘I,’ but articulate attention to what is involved in saying ‘I’ developed only with glacial slowness. Discourse about a subject requires distance or ‘objectivity’ as well as proximity: the known has to be set off somehow from the knower. The unique intimacy of the ‘I’ makes any such distance difficult to achieve. For here the known is the knower: the two...