Ron Hansen, professor of English at Santa Clara University, delivered a lecture on the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to an audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members.
Hansen told the story of the friendship between a pair of polar opposites: Hopkins, a convert to Catholicism who was ordained a Jesuit priest and whose lifelong habit of writing poetry garnered him no renown during his lifetime, and Robert Bridges, a nominal Anglican who became a physician and was named England’s poet laureate.
After attending primary school together, both men arrived at Oxford in 1863. They remained close friends during their time there, often discussing poetry, music, and the intricacies of Greek grammar. They studied classical languages and literature, but after graduating pursued quite disparate interests.
For Hopkins, Hansen explained, Christianity was central. As a freshman, he joined a high church Anglican group whose purpose was to “institute solemn liturgical ritual in Anglican services and to oppose the rationalism and theological liberalism that was emigrating from Germany.”
Hopkins began to worry about the legitimacy of Anglican dogma and sacraments, and after reading John Henry Newman’s APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, he grew anxious about converting to Roman Catholicism. Soon, however, he was received into the Church by Newman in 1866. Five years later, in 1871, Hopkins was ordained a priest in the Jesuit order and gave up his habit of writing poetry, because he believed it would “interfere with my state and vocation.”
Bridges, on the other hand, attended medical school in London and became so occupied with his studies that he neglected nearly everything else. His nominal Anglicanism turned to agnosticism, which in turn became full-fledged atheism. Hansen speculated that “Hopkins’s pedantic tendency to patronize on matters of faith and morals [caused] a chill in their relationship.” On more than one occasion, Bridges broke off correspondence with his friend for years at a time.
Though they vehemently disagreed on many theological and philosophical points, the two friends always found common ground in discussing poetic form. However, even their discussions of poetry brought tension to the surface of their relationship.
They sent each other their own poems along with requests for constructive criticism. Bridges resented Hopkins’s extremely blunt criticisms his work. Commenting on a farewell poem that Bridges had written for a hospital mentor, Hopkins wrote that parts of it were “damned obscure” and that he thought it a “waste of time and money” to have had it printed. Bridges responded with criticisms of Hopkins’s poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” disparaging some of his rhymes and remarking that “no amount of money could persuade him to read the epic again.”
Hansen pointed out that this particular critical exchange might have caused lasting damage to their friendship. Thereafter, Bridges was always critical of Hopkins’s style of “sprung rhythm” in which the meter of a poem is determined by the number of stresses in a line rather than by the number of syllables.
According to Hansen, Bridges’ “skeptical, modernist themes” stood in stark contrast to the “essential optimism of Christian faith” that Hopkins’s poems contained. Indeed, this contrast of themes mirrored the contrast of their paths in life.
Even though Bridges was responsible for the posthumous publication of many of Hopkins’s poems, he was still highly critical of his friend’s work and wrote that Hopkins had “definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face.” However, he also wrote of Hopkins, “[He] united humor, great personal charm, and the most attractive virtues of a tender and sympathetic nature—which won him love wherever he went, and gave him zeal for his work—yet he was not considered publicly successful in his profession.”
The great irony in these remarks of Bridges is that Hopkins is today more renowned and also regarded as the superior poet, in part due to Bridges’ own efforts to publish Hopkins’s poems after his death.
The lecture was the second of four installments sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture’s 2011 Catholic Culture Literature Series entitled “Victorian Catholics: Penning the Grandeur of God.”
Pete Freddoso is a junior philosophy and classics major who is always up for a good dialogue with anyone. If you’d like to take him up on the offer, he can be found near the statue of Moses by the library—don’t be intimidated by his posse of smokers.