like and different

Now you remember I wished beauty to be considered as regularity or likeness tempered by irregularity or difference...

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Note-books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Humphry House, 1937), p. 74

poetics in four words

Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Pied Beauty” gave the best statement of a poetics: “All things counter, original, spare, strange...”

wrenched diction

Lines that are wrenched suggest a powerful emotion has wrenched them, such as Hopkin’s, “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind”; but even the slightest displacement of customary acts or values will do it. For instance, “We once were in love, made love and kissed without a harmful history,” [Hardy] puts kissing after love and last in an amorous past blessed by brevity.

—William H. Gass, “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence,” Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011)

post-facto poetics

So as not to have to defend his poetry, G. M. Hopkins discovered he must invent his poetics (instress; inscape).

obscure grasping

The poetry that comes into being as a result of the working of the creative intuition upon poetic knowledge therefore reveals both an “obscure grasping of the real” and “an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet.” Maritain calls the former the “direct” sign of a poetic act and the latter a “reverse” sign of the same act. Both signs are inextricably involved in the making of a poem.

For if at the source of the poetic act there is the experience which I have tried to describe, in which the obscure grasping of the real, resounding in the creative subjectivity, is at the same time an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet, it will be necessary that the work be made a manifestation of both at once. This work is an object, and must always maintain its consistency and its proper value as an object, and at the same time it is a sign, at once a “direct” sign of the secrets perceived in things, of their avowal, of some irrecusable verity of their nature or history, transpierced by the creative intuition, and a “reverse” sign of the substance of the poet in the art of spiritual communication and revealing itself to itself. [Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry(Philosophical Library, 1955), p 84]

Samuel Hazo, The World within the Word: Maritain and the Poet (Franciscan U. Press, 2018)

JF: I wanted to like the book more than I did. So much muzzy metaphysics in Maritain’s poetics. Ample amounts of Maritain are quoted, full of abstract words and concepts, presented as though self-evident, but Maritain offers almost no textual evidence to buttress his assertions. Hazo provides many quotes from other authors to try to underpin Maritain’s bold but unfounded ideas. I give Hazo credit for linking Keats and Hopkins to some of Maritain’s ideas. However, the two poets, and their notions of ‘poetics’, prove to be more relevant to the creative process than any of Maritain’s grand notions.   

ray of light

One day [Gerard Manley] Hopkins was walking down a garden pathway when he suddenly stopped, and looking down toward a spot on the ground, began to turn round on his heel. After he had been doing this for some time an alarmed gardener, thinking him slightly queer, asked him what he was doing; to which Hopkins replied that he was trying to get the “inscape” of one single piece of gravel which was caught in the sun’s ray, and which he was trying to see from all angles.

Quoted from Donald Nicholl, Recent Thought in Focus (Sheed and Ward 1952), p. 70.

hard looks

What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford U. Press, 1959, p. 204) edited by H. House and G. Storey

emphasis needed

[Hopkins’] inventiveness worked…in the main line which the adjectival poets had established. Keats’s carved, wing’d, hid, faded, unseen, moss’d, became Hopkins’ carved, winged, dogged, cursed, freckled, fetched, plumed, in all a somewhat rarer lot; and Keats’s eager-eyed, hot-blooded, half-anguished, deep-delved, purple-stained, wild-ridged, became Hopkins’ more complicated and special carrier-witted, scroll-leaved, whirl-wind-swivelled, else-minded, heart-forsook, care-coiled, bell-swarmed, dapple-dawn-drawn, no-man-fathomed, five-lived, rarest-veined. The change is not one, as far as I can see, toward greater metaphysical farfetchedness but rather is an intensification of quality statement, an emphasis on the special perceivable nature of things, the physical sense of whirlwind, leaf, care, bell qualities. Emphasis is just what Hopkins said, in his early essay on “Poetic Diction,” the accented past participle is good for. Poetry needs more emphasis of all sorts he said there, more 18th Century liveliness, more 19th Century vividness to make mere flat “Parnassian” descriptiveness come alive.
[…]
Hopkins, like Ruskin, was a notebook sketcher and painter, by nature as by convention a wordpainter. When he was in a hurry and had little to say of the day that was closing, if it were fine he often wrote Fine in his Journal, but often Bright.

—Josephine Miles, “The Sweet and Lovely Language,” Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Kenyon Critics (New Directions, 1945)