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Review of Hopkins Re-Constructed
Review Author: Elisabeth Brown
Affiliation: University of Southern California
Poets read and write poetry, priests read and write theology, Gerard Manley Hopkins did both. Yet, many critics discuss this Jesuit priest's poetry only in terms of the poetic tradition, missing the opportunity to investigate religious references and themes. In Hopkins Re-Constructed: Life, Poetry, and the Tradition, Justus George Lawler reads Hopkins's poetry within the context of British poetry and Jesuit tradition. To extend our understanding of Hopkins's "tradition," Lawler presents several startling new readings of standard poems like "God's Grandeur" and "The Windhover" in terms of Jesuit theology and allusions.
Lawler's introduction gives us a quick overview of his method and argument -- he proposes to "read some central poems in the light of a historical and structuralist understanding of the poetic tradition, and of a broadly defined 'Catholic' understanding of the Western Christian theological and philosophical tradition" (15). The poetic tradition consists of John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne, and William Wordsworth, with several references to Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot. Using Hopkins's own letters and prose as evidence and examples, Lawler argues that Hopkins engaged in a theological and philosophical tradition shaped by Duns Scotus, St. Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, among others. To this theological tradition, Lawler adds an understanding and explication of a Jesuit lexicon "second nature to Hopkins, implicit in his daily life, and explicit in his poetry" (18).
Lawler focuses on Hopkins's representative poems: "God's Grandeur," "The Sea and the Skylark," "Pied Beauty," "The Starlight Night," and "The Windhover." Looking at "structures" like "circularity, parenthesis, enjambment, code, prepositionalizing, refrain and most importantly, complementarity," Lawler reads the poems in terms of conventional themes like "natural beauty, seasonal change, the human plight" (23). The most valuable innovation in Lawler's argument is that he provides a religious context for Hopkins's structure (or patterns) underlying these conventional themes. This leads to novel readings of well-known poems. Lawler's reading of "The Windhover" (Chapter VI) is a case in point, where the structuralist interpretation leads to an intriguing argument that connects the imagery of Hopkins's famous poem with Joan of Arc and the American Martyrs.
While Lawler's readings of the poems are sound and thought-provoking, the first two chapters of Hopkins Re-Constructed consist of "severely negative criticism" of other critics (Chapter 1) and Hopkins biographers, in particular Robert Bernard Martin (Chapter 2) (22). The criticism that Lawler presents is smug and at times mean-spirited -- for example often discounting an argument due to a minor grammatical error. Lawler's tone and general contempt for those who read Hopkins in a different way, especially feminist, queer, or Lacanian critics, discredits his otherwise valid criticism of such arguments or approaches. In his discussion of Robert Bernard Martin's Hopkins biography in Chapter 2, Lawler criticizes the lack of evidence backing Martin's claims about Hopkins's homosexuality. This point, however, gets clouded by Lawler's unnecessarily dismissive representations of Martin's argument; phrases like "emulative parrots" (85) or "gratuitous and piddling judgments" (93) abound. This sort of critical sparing does nothing to engender respect for Lawler's argument, but it does suggest a critical bias towards unconventional interpretations of Hopkins and a misunderstanding of recent critical theory. For instance, Lawler argues against reading Hopkins's poetry in terms of homosexual desire because Hopkins wrote love poems about female mermaids -- completely missing Martin's argument about homosexual desire (73-83).
The strengths of Hopkins Re-Constructed are undoubtedly the explicit readings of poems and Lawler's ability to explicate Hopkins' poems in terms of Jesuit philosophy and idiom. Readers might be well advised to take Lawler's own advice and "omit or postpone chapters 1 and 2" (22). I would suggest omitting the first two chapters altogether, but every reader should note the critical bias against more recent critical trends that these chapters manifest.
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