The First Paper of the course dealt particularly with an interpretation of The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins under the constraints of queer criticism, providing a homoerotic reading of the poem in question, on the grounds of its ambiguity between a purely religious admiration of Christ and a sensual attraction towards him. In fact, in the Conclusion to that First Paper, I personally suggested that a queer reading of Hopkins’s poetry was intrinsically related to a holistic approach too, in the sense that one single poem like The Windhover cannot either claim or disclaim that Hopkins was a gay author writing homoerotic lyrics, but that a close interpretation of his whole poetic contribution and lifetime was necessary to pose such a statement. Taking this into account, the aim of this Second Paper is to construct a consistent argument so as to support the controversial view of Hopkins as a queer poet, by means of a diachronic analysis (which can be explored either by subject or by individual poems) of a selection of his poems, those which were, to my mind, the most salient across his career in terms of homoeroticism, or at least the most representative in relation to my personal viewpoint of Hopkins’s potential homoerotic poetics.

This particular understanding of Hopkins’s poetry as queer has precisely been the subject of a critical debate between a number of academics and intellectuals, some being positioned in favour of the possibility of Hopkins being a homosexual (in contemporary terminology) poet, and others being positioned clearly against it. However it may be, I personally believe, as I said before, that a queer understanding of Hopkins as a poet requires as much a holistic approach as possible, with further insight into extra-literary fields such as his biography (along with a chronological timeline that summarises his life) and his prose works. In my opinion, both fields may be said to help, either objectively or subjectively, to consolidate the view of Hopkins as a homosexual author.

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