More from Religion and Ethics Weekly: Gerard Manley Hopkins

“If I had not discovered Hopkins, I would have had to invent him,” poet and biographer Paul Mariani wrote in “Hopkins as Lifeline,” an essay recalling his first encounter as a college student in 1962 with nineteenth-century poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. It has been a long and fruitful relationship, including a doctoral thesis Mariani revised and published as A COMMENTARY ON THE COMPLETE POEMS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (Cornell University Press, 1970), more than a dozen scholarly articles, essays, and reviews, and now his full-length biography, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A LIFE (Viking, 2008). It is a fine contribution to Hopkins scholarship, an often illuminating but sometimes uneven look at the Christ-haunted Victorian poet whose work, although never published in his lifetime, came into its own in the second half of the twentieth century, exerted a major influence on such poets as Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman, and continues to influence young poets and attract the scrutiny of academics.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mariani begins his biography with Hopkins’s most famous and indelible line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’’ and he hangs on that line, composed in Wales in 1877 while Hopkins was working his way through the rigorous process of becoming a Jesuit priest, much of the contours of Hopkins’s life. “He believed it from his undergraduate years at Oxford as an Anglican seeker,’’ Mariani writes. “Believed it so strongly that it led in large part to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Believed it as a Jesuit, and called on both Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and the insights of the philosopher Duns Scotus into Christ’s Incarnation to formulate a theodicy and a poetics which would articulate and sing what his whole self””head and heart””felt.”

That is the strength but also one of the weaknesses of Mariani’s portrait.

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