Hopkins's conversions: The case of A. C. Swinburne.
Item
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Title
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Hopkins's conversions: The case of A. C. Swinburne.
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Identifier
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AAI9304714
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identifier
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9304714
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Creator
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Overholser, Renee Value.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gerhard Joseph
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Gerard Manley Hopkins's religious and psycho-sexual crisis at Oxford, which led him to renounce poetry, culminated in his entry into the Society of Jesus. There the young novice eased the problem of "looking" at beautiful male bodies by turning his eyes toward the fully-imagined body of Christ, as Jesuit training prescribed.;During the seven years before The Wreck of the Deutschland, Hopkins began to develop a new poesis which would permit him to return to the practice of poetry. He accomplished it in part through appropriations from the texts of Algernon Swinburne. Hopkins and Swinburne had diverged over major social and religious issues at Oxford, and Hopkins was an astute, if disingenuous, critic of his poetry. Turning away from lyric subjectivity, Hopkins attempted to serve the cause of Roman Catholicism by in corporating transmuted elements from the work of the era's most vocally heretical revolutionary into his early Jesuit poetry. The shift in intention was announced in "St. Dorothea: Lines for a Picture," written just before he entered the novitiate.;"Ad Mariam," a direct imitation of the "Hounds of spring" Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, transforms praise of Artemis into a paean to Mary while erasing the threatening sexuality of Swinburne's landscape. "Rosa Mystica" continues the process of sexual purification. However, the many Swinburnian appropriations in The Wreck of the Deutschland, most notably from the political poetry of Songs Before Sunrise, serve a double purpose: to counteract Swinburne's attacks on the Church and the Jesuits; and to celebrate Hopkins's sense that the beloved body of Christ is everywhere present in the natural world. Swinburne's repeated trope of the figure of Freedom rising to proclaim mankind's future release from the bondage of priests and kings looms behind Hopkins's representation of Christ. Reinvesting nature with generative sexuality, with the help of Swinburne's sensual insights, Hopkins went on to the great sonnets of the 1870s.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
