Although initially Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “religious turn”—that is, his conversion to Catholicism and subsequent decision to become a priest—was also a turning away from poetry, it is in fact during his time as a monk that Hopkins developed his most daring and experimental contributions to poetics. Most who are familiar with Hopkins will also recognize the phrase “sprung rhythm,” a name he invented for a particular metrical pattern employed most famously in his poem “The Windhover.” However, this one particular form barely scratches the surface of the wide-ranging, almost obsessive nature of Hopkins’ experiments with prosody.
One shouldn’t think of this as merely an investigation into one of the formal elements of poetry, but, as Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson write in Poets for the Millenium, Vol. III, “as a seek[ing] for ways to foster a new & 'inner' vision in the world at large…” (741). In tandem with his development of “sprung rhythm” as a technique, Hopkins developed a complex theory linking his experiments in prosody to the most fundamental aspects of poetry as an art, and even of human speech and communication in general.
This theory involved a network of neologisms, a group of interrelated terms/concepts Hopkins invented or gave new meaning in order to describe various elements of poetic practice and of the essential nature of poetry. He also developed an extensive system of diacritical markings, resembling musical notation, for denoting the rhythm of his poems (see related links or Poems for the Millenium for examples). In this way, Hopkins reflects a broader concern within Victorian poetics, described by Ben Glaser in Modernism’s Mentronome as “simultaneously obsessed with the ‘metrical mediation of voice’ and the ‘materialization’ of that voice in orthography as well as performance” (15).
Many of Hopkins’ neologisms, with which he attempted to delineate his poetics, can be seen as attempts to negotiate and synthesize this tension. Hopkins coined these terms to describe various poetic “moves” or effects, some of which were also his own inventions: chiming, vowelling, oftening, over-and-overing, aftering, to name just a few. These words evoke, like his diacritical markings, musical notation (e.g., fortissimo, piano, pianissimo, etc.), but also a kind of choreography; synthesizing poetry’s orthographical elements with poetry as performance.
This isn’t to say that Hopkins merely recapitulated, or exemplified, the poetics of his era. On the contrary: his poetics, like his life, was one of extremes, as well as contradictions. He wrote of “sprung rhythm” that he intended it to be “nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the narrative and natural language of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms.” And also, of poetic language in general, “that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not…an obsolete one” (129, Selected Letters). These definitions appear, at first, strikingly contradictory. In common usage we don’t associate the most “natural” and “least forced” speech with “the most rhetorical and emphatic.” In fact, we tend to think of these as near-opposites. It is, in this way, “unlike itself.” The implication is, perhaps, that we’ve become alienated, so to speak, from “natural” speech, that it therefore strikes us as rhetorical, emphatic, exaggerated, strange. Hopkins’ poetics could therefore be seen as a kind of challenge, urging his readers to re-appropriate the fullness, power, and force of our uncommon yet “natural” language.
