Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life [Hardcover]

Paul Mariani (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 30, 2008

An insightful and inspirational biography of the heroic and spiritual poet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844?1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins?s descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies.

Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins?s spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The strength of this meticulous chronicle of the 19th-century Jesuit is the author's focus on the inner life of a poet who was critically acclaimed after his death and almost unknown in his lifetime. The resulting lack of context is also the volume's most persistent and occasionally tiresome weakness. A Hopkins scholar and poet who has written biographies of poets William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell, Mariani has woven together Hopkins's correspondence, sermons, journal entries and other materials to form a frequently fascinating account of the poet's life from his decision to leave the Church of England at age 22 to his death 22 years later. The biographer also analyzes the poet's innovative, idiosyncratic poems and their philosophical, theological and literary roots. The book would have benefited greatly by occasional views of the political, spiritual and artistic environment that influenced Hopkins and his literary contemporaries. Nonetheless, there is much to learn from this portrayal of an opinionated, often depressed yet likable priest-poet who toiled in near obscurity, constantly trying to subordinate his poetic gifts to his calling to serve God. (Nov. 3)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* “What daring!” exclaimed a young Hart Crane upon first reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In showing how such daring opened a new path in poetry, Mariani retraces a torturous spiritual journey with the same acumen that has won praise for his biographies of Lowell, Williams, and Berryman. Readers soon confront a paradox: the courage that made Hopkins a creative revolutionary first manifests itself in his decision to defy Victorian prejudices by submitting to Catholic doctrine and to the rigors of Jesuit discipline. To be sure, Hopkins suffers when obtuse ecclesiastical leaders suppress his literary talent, consigning him to lonely labors at a decrepit Irish university. Nonetheless, religious devotion remains the explosive force that blazes forth in poems such as “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur.” The story behind such masterpieces of faith—poignantly matched by lesser-known masterpieces of despair—illuminates the genius who infused technical innovations (such as sprung rhythm) with a profound metaphysical vision (“inscape”). But a puzzle emerges in Hopkins’ long correspondence with Robert Bridges, the gifted friend who brings Hopkins’ verse to light 25 years after his death. How, readers may ask, did it fall to an agnostic to rescue supernal Christian art from oblivion? Literary scholarship informed by rare passion. --Bryce Christensen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670020311
• ISBN-13: 978-0670020317
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.5 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #343,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The oldest of seven children from a working-class background, Paul Mariani was born in New York City in 1940 and grew up there and on Long Island. He earned his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College, a Master's from Colgate University, and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He is the author of six poetry collections: Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), The Great Wheel (W. W. Norton, 1996), Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems (1990), Prime Mover (1985), Crossing Cocytus (1982), and Timing Devices (1979).

He has published numerous books of prose, including Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking, 2002), and God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia Press, 2002). Other books include A Usable Past: Essays, 1973-1983 (1984), William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (1975), and A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), as well as five biographies: Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Viking, 2008) The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton, 1999); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994), all named New York Times Notable Books of the year; Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); and William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), which won the New Jersey Writers Award, was short-listed for an American Book Award, and was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the year.

His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also been shortlisted for the Tait Award for biography. He was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 until 2000, when he was named University Professor of English at Boston College. In 2009 he received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Mariani and his wife, Eileen, have three grown sons and live in western Massachusetts. He is currently working on a memoir of growing up on the mean streets of Manhattan in the 1940s.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The transformed poetic vision, the grinding daily duty May 26, 2009

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In an immediate prose always in the present tense, Mariani distills forty years of research into a biography drawn from Hopkins' journals and correspondence. No critical detours, no theoretical jargon, only a sense of watching the poet labor and priest struggle. It's a scholarly work that reads like a novel.

The highlights, a discussion of "The Wreck of the Deutschland" as the early breakthrough, and the late "Hericlitean fire" poem, show Hopkins consistently battling despair by insisting upon the sacramental vision that transforms the mundane by the example of the Incarnated God. Taking the trouble out of love to become flesh, Christ for Hopkins proves the "Real Presence" in the Eucharist that exemplifies the transformation of the natural into the divine. This, Mariani gracefully depicts, takes Hopkins out of the agnostic, Darwinian, mechanistic milieu of his Oxford peers into a bold decision to take the toughest path possible: to give up his security and his career prospects to become not only a Catholic but a Jesuit.

The arduous years towards ordination do not end there; toiling in gritty, urban immigrant-poor parishes deprived Hopkins of his beloved countryside that in his studies in Wales brought him closest to what "Pied Beauty" and "God's Grandeur" convey memorably: the shattering of the norm by the intense arrival of God, transforming but remaining within our beautiful world. Mariani takes Hopkins' priestly vocation to show how he believed what he preached, lived, and promoted in poems that could not find any audience, and for long stretches as a Jesuit, Hopkins either denied himself or lacked the time or inspiration to write verse....

He wore himself out young, dying at forty-four, of a typhoid flea's bite (or perhaps, Mariani suggests, what we know now as Crohn's disease). Hopkins in these pages remains, of course, a rather introverted, nervous, and conflicted man, fighting a lonely campaign against "acedia" and spiritual despair, shunted about from one dull assignment as a teacher or preacher to another in rapid fashion until at the ramshackle University College, Dublin, he's hired on the cheap as Jesuits will return their 400 pounds annual salary to the running of the institution!

Hopkins wore out his talent in drudgery. He knew it, too. Reading about the 557 exams in Greek and Latin facing him one day to grade down to the eighth-of-a-point, his dreary lessons to bored undergrads, his failure to get even his one patient reader-- lifelong friend, future laureate and editor Robert Bridges-- to understand much of his formidably dense and amazingly original verse, Hopkins emerges as a saint for his willingness to keep on in a very anguished and solitary calling. His eccentricities make him more like us; his gifts separate his daring energy from us.

He had a great knack for wordplay and punning; his comic verse as a young Jesuit sparkles. Arm wrestling, chasing a monkey on a roof, trying to mesmerize a duck so to study its beak, scrutinizing a peacock as closely as an oak tree's leaves, dragging or being dragged around a Dublin classroom to show Hector's posthumous fate: these vignettes enliven an otherwise serious life and biography. Mariani's extended, deadpan recital of a failed student sermon on the miracle of loaves and fishes that tried to relate the Ignatian "Composition of Place" to the Welsh local landscape fails magnificently in its "overdetermined" and unconsciously pedantic parody. I also heard wistfulness, when late in his life-- as Mariani shows, nearly all spent with males around him-- he admits to a Dublin class "while lecturing on Homer's Helen," he looks up from the text. "'You know, I never saw a naked woman.' And then, after a moment, 'I wish I had.'" (391)

The book has its slow stretches, as it takes a closely observed, scrupulously attentive, and very gifted fish-out-of-water character as its subject. And, being so focused on the protagonist's correspondence and journals, you never get a chance to step back from this startlingly precocious modernist. Still, this is a study based on primary sources and archival diligence. Like the man himself, it's a demanding subject.

Hopkins' compression of lines by sprung rhythm that takes the beat and puts it where he wants outside syllabic convention only grows with time into a dense, hammering, melodic, thundering pulse. Mariani takes you through the famous and the obscure poems and intersperses his own subtle explanations of how Hopkin's thoughts and circumstances evolved into what emerged on the pages of his unpublished poems. The instress forces you deep, into dark realms that mirrored Hopkins' own terror, and his rage at the natural world's beauties being savaged, the work of God ignored or denigrated, and the message of the Incarnation belittled or cheapened.

The "lens of faith" magnified and intensified, and perhaps distorted what Hopkins saw, in slums and on slopes. He looked at a Welsh stream's storm flow as if "melted candy," he saw himself, Mariani imagines, with God "whispering like some old married couple," and Hopkins learned, if to his Jesuit superiors' suspicion, to stress the "haeceittas," the Scotist "this-ness" of the startlingly individualized rather than the conventional Thomistic classification into general categories. He could not help but pick out the detail, to his detriment as a Jesuit preacher perhaps but to his advantage as a radical poet. He seems, too, to have been capable of such craft early on; Mariani does not truly explain 'why' this came to be, but concentrates on 'how' this works in Hopkins' intricate lines, that, as he matured, became more compounded and more off-kilter. Mariani shows how Hopkins' poetry expresses what his life contained, but Mariani seems to step away from accounting for it critically, preferring to present the verse and correspondence to us directly.

(By the way, one wonders what Joyce, who put the real "Rev. John Conmee, SJ" into "Ulysses," would have made of this transplanted Dubliner and his experiments with language, done in the few spare moments by one who met Conmee. Imagine Hopkins, both alienated from Ireland and sympathetic towards Home Rule despite his imperial patriotism, this weary Englishman and transplanted Classics professor longing for the Welsh mountains, by chance wandering and worn out late in his short life on O'Connell St one day. Conmee offered his tired younger confrere a rest at Clongowes Wood.)

A note on two tiny details: the early theologian's name's "Origen," not "Origin." And, Moel Fam[m]au in Wales is translated not as "mother of mountains" but the "'mountain/ bald topped-eminence' of mother.'" Mariani's love for Hopkins comes through along with his even-handed critiques in an impressively learned book, with a bibliography of Hopkins criticism, that nonetheless without being impeded by intrusive notes wears its own scholarship well. I never thought such an outwardly placid life as Hopkins has been portrayed to live had within such drama. Read more ›

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars masterful March 30, 2009

By J. Webber

Format:Hardcover

Paul Mariani has generously given us a magnificent gift. In exploring the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins, he has unveiled for us the interior life of this brilliant and eccentric poet-priest who could not (or would not) have his poetry published during his own lifetime.

Mariani has waded through letters, journals, and sermons to give context for the life of this devout little man and to provide a setting for his poetry. The context at times feels tedious, but never boring. Each entry helps to build the life of this complex Jesuit priest. And together the entries provide a setting for Hopkins' poetry, which Mariani deals with in great length. Having done his doctoral work on Hopkins' poetry, he has a fine understanding of the poet's nuances, difficult enough for Hopkins' casual fans. I found his commentary to be very helpful in unpacking some of the obscure references in Hopkins' poetry. Further, Mariani utilizes Hopkins' own vocabulary and style at many points to provide interpretive material. Mariani writes prose with a poet's heart.

I was most grateful that Mariani explored the spiritual foundations of Hopkins' life and poetry. Mariani was not shy about using Hopkins' own language to describe his struggle with God and Church. Most refreshing, Mariani wrote as an "insider." As a practicing Roman Catholic (with a Jesuit priest son), Mariani doesn't have to "borrow" spiritual language. It seems to me that Hopkins would be impossible to understand well apart from who he was as a man devoted to God. Mariani captures that devotion -- which was also a source of deep difficulty for Hopkins -- and struggle well.

I recommend this book without reservation.

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Unrivalled November 28, 2008

By Hart Crane

Format:Hardcover

Portrayed in his fullness as poet, spiritualist and Roman Catholic Jesuit amid Victorian England--Hopkins steps out of these pages. You can feel him breathe. This biography cancels out all others.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I'll read it again. January 30, 2010

By Lawrence G. DeBlois

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this text because Paul Mariani wrote it. I've read Hopkins poetry for years and enjoyed what I could understand. Mariani showed me what I didn't understand and he placed each poem in its historical, biographical context. That helped. I'll read the book again. The book does take some work but it's worth the effort.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry Begetting Poetry October 22, 2009

By Terri Renee Moore

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It has been some time now since I read Mariani's beautiful biography of Hopkins. So what remains in me is the emotion of the book. Wading into the first chapter, I remember how strange the style of writing felt to me. Mariani swung from staccato journalese in one chapter to flowing, florid poetical syntax the next. How strange, how different - now I wouldn't have it any other way. Later, I began having issues with Mariani the poet competing with Hopkins himself. I got over that in a hurry, I now wish all books were written so beautifully.

Regarding Hopkins the man. I find so much beauty in him, so much transcendence, as well as a deliciously deep and flawed human being. The revelations about Hopkins' difficulties and perfectionism regarding his poetry; his having to gain the approval of the Jesuit censors and believing he should (and would) forego acclaim in his lifetime. What joy in pain.

Reading of Hopkins' only love affair with his best friend was heart wrenching. So tragic, so lovely. Both the man and this book. The measure of all books in my opinion: I couldn't put it down. And in the end, I rued the fact that it was over (How could I ever find another book I loved as much?)and as all biographies end, this beautiful man, whom Mariani had helped me know and love, had died. I closed the cover after some time, tears flowing, a wretched smile on my face. I tend to believe that this will be the only book that I re-read in this lifetime. A Masterpiece!