I would like to begin this book in the first person. After more than ten years of a repeated and almost obsessive revisiting of Gerard Manley Hopkins, reflecting upon his poems of exquisite, breath-taking beauty, agonizing over his seemingly contradictory passages, and my own commentaries and formalizations, I gradually came to the conclusion that it is with our own critical perspectives that we—“the Hopkins scholars”—should begin. This study of Hopkins’s poetry largely embraces the phenomenological perspective and, correspondingly, aims to analyze the configuration of meanings in his poems, as well as within the philosophical and experiential world of...

“Inscape” and “instress” are, without a doubt, the core of Hopkins’s poetics and the most overdetermined words in the vocabulary of Hopkins criticism. Though most critics who wrote on him foregrounded these enigmatic terms, there are hardly two who completely agree upon their meaning. “Inscape,” for example, has been translated as external design, aesthetic conception, “intrinsic beauty,” “the intrinsic form of a thing,” “a form perceived in nature,” the individual self, “the expression of the inner core of individuality,” the “peculiar inner nature of things and persons, expressed in form and gesture,” “an essence or identity embodied in the thing,”...

I would like to begin this analysis of Hopkins’s representation of the existential with some brief remarks on his physical and psychological condition in the last decade of his life. It is well known that the last years of Hopkins’s life were, in all probability, his darkest period.¹ To begin with, although he had several close acquaintances both in Dublin and in Monasterevan, he felt lonely and alienated. His former friends and fellow poets were far away; and Hopkins had very little in common with most of his colleagues and students. Furthermore, as often happens, his alienation from the existential...

One of the important theoretical lessons that could be learned from the Russian structuralism of the 1970s and the 1980s is that, despite all the objections of the deconstructive school, binaries remain one of the crucial elements of any economy of signs. Strictly speaking, the possibility of transgressing a binary opposition does not imply its nonexistence; no binary structure can be repudiated on the basis of what is often considered as the decisive evidence against structuralism: the demonstrable possibility of the collapse of opposite binary terms into one another. Moreover, when a critic or a historian demonstrates this possibility, he...

It is high time to address the long-delayed question of the relationship between the intellectual and the existential dimensions of Hopkins’s poetry, as well as to assess some of its technical aspects. The systematic description of both realms that has been carried out above already makes it possible. At the same time, despite its seeming obviousness, the problem itself should be clarified and specified. It must be stressed that the intellectual and the existential are intratextual characteristics: they belong to the text itself. The ideological and the biographical, on the other hand, are extratextual realms, whose elements are absorbed into,...

Since Kant, scholars have been taught that a long analytical stage must always precede a synthetic one, if the idea of synthesis is to be taken seriously. Therefore, it is only now that one should turn to such synthesis. As has already been said, Hopkins critics have often concentrated on his “intellectual perspective” in an attempt to reconcile apparently incongruent ideas in his poems with their overall theories and ideological constructs. However, the understanding of a basic split in Hopkins’s work, between the general hermeneutic framework and his representation of the experience of the world, is capable of illuminating its...