With reference to Hopkins’s poem The Windhover, which was the focus of study in the First Paper of the course, Julia F. Saville points out intelligently: “To acknowledge the sensuality and eroticism in a sonnet like “The Windhover” seems to question its devotional and ascetic status” (Saville 2000: 4). Such statement allows her to introduce in her work A Queer Chivalry the academic and critical confrontation as far as the question of Hopkins’s possible homoerotic poetics is concerned:

“Up to now this dilemma has split Hopkins’s commentators into what appear to be two irreconcilable camps. On the one hand are those who draw attention to the highly sensual, sometimes homoerotic nuances in his poetry, often with the purpose of assimilating him into a genre of sexually dissident literature emergent in the mid- to late nineteenth century. On the other hand are those who feel it necessary to defend Hopkins against homoerotic interpretation, insisting on the minor significance, if not impossibility, of such resonances, given the resolutely devotional nature of his work.” (Saville 2000: 4)

Saville’s position to this respect corresponds to the first of the “two irreconcilable camps” she mentions. She coins in her book the compound term “Hopkins’s poetics of homoerotic asceticism”, in view of her argument that Hopkins’s “poetic innovations, and especially rhythmic experiments (…) enable him to negotiate what might otherwise have been an unendurable nexus of competing cultural and personal imperatives” (Saville 2000: 1). Basically, Saville suggests that “ascetic practices that appear to mortify the flesh in the interests of spiritual invigoration may paradoxically prove sensually and erotically satisfying too” (Saville 2000: 5), and as such, her perspective sustains “Hopkins’s poetic career not as a steady linear progression but as a continuous process of negotiating desire through self-discipline, self-denial, and even at times self-hatred” (Saville 2000: 7)—most particularly, homosexual desire. However, as she has already stated, whether Hopkins was a homosexual poet or not actually produces a twofold critical spectre, of which she provides several examples:

“Exchanges have ranged from W. H. Auden’s passing reference in 1934 to “a conflict in Hopkins between homosexual feelings and a moral sense of guilt” (500), to W. H. Gardner’s anxiously adamant response in 1949 that “there is nothing in these diaries [the early notebooks of 1865] to suggest, let alone prove, that Hopkins was tainted with any serious homosexual abnormality. (The question would not be raised here had it not been raised elsewhere by certain uninformed or misguided critics.)” (2:85). Then, in his 1979 essay-length celebration of the poet, “Recovering Hopkins, Recovering Ourselves,” Michael Lynch claimed, “Yes, Hopkins was tainted, Hopkins was gay. Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” thereby provoking a series of rebuttals (108). To one critic Lynch’s essay was “a distinctly queer one – in every sense of that word” (Milward 23); to another it was “an unwarranted ideological farce” (Walhour 122). Most recently, the question of Hopkins’s gender orientation has reemerged within the energetic debate over the role played by aesthetics in the development of alternative Victorian male subcultures. Linda Dowling has argued that it is difficult to find anything in Hopkins’s poetry that consciously authorizes us to link him to the kind of homosexual subculture fostered allusively by Walt Whitman or overtly by Symonds (“Ruskin’s Pied Beauty” 7). Dellamora, however, has offered a suggestive reading of the fragments of Hopkins’s “Epithalamion,” comparing it to Whitman’s “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore” (section 11 of “Song of Myself”). He then describes Hopkins’s representations of an androgynous Christ through the blending of medieval and High Renaissance aesthetics with a specifically Oxonian Hellenism (Masculine Desire 42-57). Joseph Bristow has extended what he considers Dellamora’s partial analysis by arguing that Hopkins’s later poetry “signals an altogether new male-male eroticism that largely stems from an idealization of the fighting fit body (…)” (“‘Churlsgrace’” 696).” (Saville 2000: 4-5)

Furthermore, some other critical stances have been encountered during research for this paper. To begin with, in both introductions to her two editions of Hopkins’s poetry, Catherine Phillips does mention the issue quite objectively, yet verging on political correctness. In her 1986 edition, she recalls Hopkins’s friendship with Dolben and observes the following:

“In February 1865 Bridges’s ‘cousin’, Digby Dolben, visited him at Oxford and met Hopkins. At that time Hopkins and Dolben had in common their considerable interest in the Roman Catholic Church and in the writing of poetry. Hopkins obviously admired Dolben and was keen to continue their friendship. They were at an age and in an institution in which male relationships were exceedingly close, but evidence is now appearing which suggests that in the past too much has been made of Hopkins’s feelings for Dolben. For example, two poems allegedly written with him in mind have now convincingly been shown to have quite different origins and implications (see ‘Where art thou friend’ and ‘Not kind! to freeze me’). Hopkins was aware of how easily sexual drive could be aroused (see a late poem, ‘To what serves Mortal Beauty?’) and no doubt disquiet at this unruly side of himself played a part in channelling his feelings into religious fervour. It is clear, however, that despite a certain suppressed sexuality and frustration of ambition, evident in the mature poems, he was able to develop great warmheartedness, wit, and exceptional honesty.” (Phillips 1986: xix)

Similarly, her 1998 introduction offers no increase in intensity, she remains objectively neutral and tries not to favour either one interpretation or the other. This time, she recalls once again the Dolben episode and points at Hopkins’s early poems:

“Dolben and Hopkins met during a visit Dolben paid to Oxford in February 1865. They discovered that they had much in common – interests in writing poetry, religious inclinations, and probably a certain sexual attraction.” (Phillips 1998: xiii)

“Poems written while he was an undergraduate show Hopkins working through not only his religious convictions but the philosophical problems of how man’s experience of the world is shaped by internal as well as external forces. They show too a self-discontent in his struggle to control his sexual impulses and the rougher edges of his personality.” (Phillips 1998: xii)

As it is evident, no explicit mentioning of homosexual desire takes place here. Phillips speaks of “a certain suppressed sexuality” or “sexual impulses”, and of a questionable “sexual attraction” to Dolben, but no hint on the possible homoerotic content of Hopkins’s poetry. In a similar pattern, Gerald Roberts, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Literary Life, only mentions the word ‘homoerotic’ (or other terms related to the subject that concerns us here) in page 136, nearing the end of the book—interestingly enough, there is also no reference to Dolben. Particularly, Roberts mentions the word when commenting Hopkins’s poem Harry Ploughman. Even though he objectively admits that such a view depends on a personal reading, he definitely does not legitimise a homoerotic interpretation, not only of Harry Ploughman, but of Hopkins’s poetry as a whole:

“The poem has also attracted comment because of the alleged homo-erotic element that some readers have detected in its description of the male physique. This topic is always likely to be controversial and subject to person impression: throughout the ages the human body has been admired, both in art and real life, without any necessary homosexual implication, and the appeal to Hopkins of femininity and marriage can equally well be demonstrated in his letters and poems. If images of the male sometimes played a larger part in his life than the female, this is hardly surprising in his vocation as a Catholic priest and in a culture dominated by masculine values.” (Roberts 1994: 136-137)

A more ambiguous position is encountered in Robert Preyer. He makes no reference at all in his essay devoted to Hopkins to the possibility of homoeroticism in his poetry. Yet, in the closing paragraph of the chapter, Preyer poses a dilemma, which is definitely reasonable, between a contemporary reading of Hopkins and the state of affairs during the second half of the 19th century in which he wrote his poetry, and most particularly, Hopkins’s state of mind in that historical context:

“(…) One should point out that Hopkins seems never to have concerned himself with depth psychology. He thinks with the categories of theology: conduct is good or evil; he would not have employed the contemporary psychological categories that have replaced the older languages – such phrases as ‘authentic’ and ‘false’ behaviour. Contemporary man prefers to think of rigidity on the surface – men are locked into social, political, even bodily rigidities, patterns of conduct, their tragedy consists in being disconnected from the flux and dark flow and interconnectedness of the preconscious and subconscious. ‘Authenticity’ means that one’s surfaces are in consonance with one’s depths; that libidinal energies flowing from this interior ground of being are constantly renewing the otherwise brittle and hardening surface of our life and intellect. It is a very different paradigm from the one Hopkins embraced. Yet both paradigms are capable of displaying the ‘piedness’ or particularity and clutter of phenomenal and human experience and also of providing the listener with an intensely dramatic awareness of the emergence from all this variety of a mysterious unity, pattern, or law, which constitutes its ground of being and largest claim to significance.” (Preyer 1972: 195)

In contrast, W. H. Gardner’s position is certainly the most radical in comparison with the ones mentioned previously, though in his favour it must be mentioned that his two contributions (introductions to two editions of Hopkins’s work) are by far the oldest, one corresponding to 1949 and the other to 1985. On the one hand, Gardner makes no overt reference to homoeroticism, but criticises the extra-literary questioning against Hopkins, particularly the Freudian psychoanalytic approach:

“Whoever would understand Hopkins must go not to Freudian psychology but rather to the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. Loyola was a great psychologist, and the religious values for which he and his disciple Hopkins stood have never been confuted, though they have often been rejected or ignored. Hopkins was an idealist afflicted with ‘world-sorrow’ (…).” (Gardner 1949: xxi)

“Those who consider Hopkins a great or at least a major poet will admit that some of his syntactical inversions and ellipses, his far-stepping parentheses and violent packing of words into unexpected places, are devices (not ‘tricks’, by your leave) which sometimes subject both the language and the reader to a strain all but disastrous. Yet in the face of these eccentricities the reactions of different readers are so varied that the critic who condemns any one passage or expression is almost certain to be hurting the feelings of some equally well-informed admirer.” (Gardner 1949: xxiv)

More recently, in 1985, Gardner does acknowledge the issue of some kind of sexual nature in Hopkins’s works, yet disclaims it and still resists to speak explicitly about a homosexual issue (thus, his reference could certainly be understood as heterosexual). In the first of the following passages, Gardner does not only disclaim the possibility of an erotic aesthetic impulse in Hopkins, but simply displaces the subject and decides not to treat it. In contrast however, the second passage posits, quite surprisingly, an interesting duality between Hopkins and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when referring to the nature of Hopkins’s “terrible [1885] sonnets”, though he immediately defends Hopkins by referring back to St. Augustine:

“And what of the view, often asserted, that the last sonnets are, for all their art, unmistakable symptoms of acute neurosis due to thwarted impulses, both sexual and artistic? The first issue cannot be discussed here, but even if an unwarrantably large concession were made to the psychoanalytic diagnosis, the deeper spiritual significances of the sonnets numbered 41 to 46 would remain untouched. As an artist, Hopkins must have felt the lack of that success which he often declared to be right and proper for his own poet-friends: (…).” (Gardner 1985: xxviii)

“Some critics have taken the signs of inner conflict in these poems to be indications of fundamental doubt, a mood of rebellion, a submerged and rather unseemly scuffle between a Jesuit-Jekyll and a hedonist-Hyde. (He confessed that his own ‘Hyde’ was worse than R. L. Stevenson’s; but then St. Augustine would have confessed the same.) Hopkins also said: ‘I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it.’” (Gardner 1985: xxviii-xxix)

In direct opposition to Gardner, Michael Schmidt deals in his chapter devoted to Hopkins with both biographical and literary aspects which I have never encountered before (such as Hopkins’s meeting with homosexual painter Simeon Solomon) or which I have never seen depicted as overtly and frankly as they are here. Thus I believe several passages of his work are worth quoting:

“Not yet quite fixed on his religious vocation, Gerard Manley Hopkins saw Swinburne at Oxford when he returned to take his degree. Walter Pater, who had been his tutor, arranged to introduce Hopkins to Swinburne’s intimate friend, the exuberant painter Simeon Solomon. A month later he visited Solomon’s studio in Pater’s company. Solomon was an outspoken homosexual associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1873 (well before Oscar Wilde) he was charged with buggery. His career destroyed, he became an alcoholic and died in a work-house in 1905. Hopkins does not describe his visit to Solomon’s studio or his response to the painter’s later fate, but his own temperament at the time was unresolved and Solomon’s evident talent and lifestyle represent a kind of final siren-call to the young poet about to become a novice in the Jesuit order. At Oxford he had fallen in love with a young poet called Digby Mackworth Dolben – Robert Bridges introduced them – and they exchanged poems. ‘It was probably from Dolben that Hopkins caught the habit of thinking of the manhood of Jesus Christ in distinctly physical terms,’ writes Gregory Woods. In 1867 Dolben drowned, ‘and his influence on Hopkins became all the more lastingly intense in the refining fire of grief’. The influence was less on his poetry than on his spirit. He too ‘belonged to that culture of sentimental and erotic male friendships shaped by both Greece and (Catholic) Rome to which Newman and Faber had belonged before him.’ His spirituality was carnal; was perhaps a way of dealing with and rendering transcendent what in a different man would have been a carnal choice, a spiritual abdication.” (Schmidt 1999: 551-552)

“His Pater-like aestheticism transcended itself into religious faith; his sexual ambivalence honed his chastity, so that at times his posture in relation to God is comparable to Donne’s, though his sense of the literal surrounding world, through which grace is manifest, is more solid than Donne’s, less deliberately dramatic.” (Schmidt 1999: 552)

“His first ambition was to be an artist. Ruskin and  the Pre-Raphaelites prescribed his early world. Human figures are idealized and refined into representative types. Female figures generally embody purity and vocation. Male figures can be treated with greater freedom and ambiguity. Hopkins’ verse never outgrows what at first seems an adolescent sensualism but is in fact a chaste homo-eroticism.” (Schmidt 1999: 553)

“At university Hopkins’ discipline began: self-denial in the interests of the self. He evokes the effect of religious faith on the imagination. Imagine, he says, the world reflected in a waterdrop: a small, precise reflection. Then imagine the world reflected in a drop of Christ’s blood: the same reflection, but suffused with the hue of love, sacrifice, God made man, and redemption. Religious faith discovers for a troubled imagination an underlying coherence which knows that it cannot be fully or adequately explained. In its liberating, suffusing light, Hopkins could relish out loud the uniqueness of  things, which made them ‘individually distinctive’. This he called ‘inscape’ – an artist’s term. ‘Instress’, another bit of individual jargon, refers to the force maintaining inscape. Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.” (Schmidt 1999: 554)

As an end note, I would like to quote one full passage from the Wikipedia entry on Hopkins, specifically the section devoted to Erotic influences. The excerpt operates in a similar manner as the passage quoted above by Saville, gathering opposing critical perspectives on the question that concerns us in this paper. Above all, I would like to emphasise the concept of eisegesis, which I had never encountered before and which I believe will be crucial in our present study:

“Some critics have argued that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious, or, that they can be classified under the broader category of “homosociality,” over the gender, sexual-specific “homosexual” term. Hopkins’s journal writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminized beauty. In his book Hopkins Reconstructed (2000) Justus George Lawler critiques Robert Martin’s controversial biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991) by suggesting that Martin “cannot see the heterosexual beam… for the homosexual biographical mote in his own eye… it amounts to a slanted eisegesis”. The poems that elicit homoerotic readings can be read not merely as exercises in sublimation but as powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family and even led him to burn some of his poems that he felt were unnecessarily self-centered.” (Wikipedia contributors)

On the whole, as we have seen there is sufficient critical or academic evidence above so as to claim that the question that concerns us here (the extent to which Hopkins’s poetry can be considered homoerotic) is of an undeniable controversial nature and of a highly impossible resolution, two characteristics which spring from the abundant heterogeneous (and many times opposing) literary criticism regarding the figure of Hopkins.

.

.

«BIOGRAPHY OF HOPKINS»

«HOPKINS AND PROSE»

«INTRODUCTION»

«COVER PAGE»