1866: Joins the Roman Catholic Church
1877: Ordained
1884: Appointed Professor of Classics at University College, Dublin
1918: Posthumous publication of his poems by Robert Bridges
Click here to see
some poems by John Donne, an important predecessor for Hopkins
Characteristics of sprung rhythm: regular number of stressed syllables per line;
irregular numbers of unstressed ("slack") syllables; varying
"weights" to stresses, some marked; frequent use of enjambement
Inscape: "the distinctive design that constitutes individual
identity." Hopkins wrote, "But as air, melody, is what strikes me
most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in
the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry."
Instress: "the apprehension of inscape." "And man or woman, the
most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe,
recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust
of energy towards it that enables one to realize its specific
distinctiveness."
quotations taken from The Norton Anthology
of English Literature, (7th ed.) vol. 2, pp. 1649-1650.
For discussion:
In the conclusion to The Renaissance,
Pater claims that "experience, already reduced to a group of impressions,
is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through
which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which
we can only conjecture to be without.
Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in
his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a
world" (Norton 1643).
Pater's vision could be of a terrifying solipsism--how does it compare
with Hopkins's representation of his impressions in, especially, the "terrible"
sonnets? What could--for Hopkins
or Pater--liberate one from one's own "dream of a world"?