Hopkins Unselved

Abstract

Hopkins Unselved Jack L Hart (bio) In a well-known note, Hopkins identifies a characteristic he terms “Parnas-sian.” This “language of verse,” he says, “can only be written spoken by poets”; it is “ wrspoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind.” Resisting the fickleness of “inspiration,” this “Parnassian” way of composing relies on a kind of certainty: Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, ^– ^ this point is to be marked,–they can see things and describe them in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like. . . . Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet.1 That “most of his style” invites further reflection: as the deleted “written” almost splutters out again as “wr-,” we see the poet continually drawn back to something about poetry he cannot quite pin down here—or a temporality managed on the page that he cannot escape, as the deletions seem to suggest. Even as he begins to draw up a distinction between “inspired” poetry and “Parnas-sian,” his qualification (“generally”) puts him on the defensive. A further self-revision from “manner” to “mannerism” shows Hopkins reaching toward ideas rather than simply retreading them, both syntactically and in his revisionary pro cesses. If describing the more traditional notion of inspiration comes easily, turning his attention to how poetry works on the “level of a poet’s mind” is a sticking point. There is a subterranean anxiety for the poet concealed within his description of conceiving “oneself writing it if one were the poet.” Fluency in one’s own style arrives not as an aspiration but as a caution; to write as if you were yourself, then, might be a kind of self-assuredness to be avoided. That Hopkins’s interest in a compositional style proved on the pulse might reflect his conception of selfhood is suggested in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” “Each mortal thing,” he writes, “does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves–goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.”2 That dash is not necessarily the self-enervating, but suspends the process [End Page 205] of selving before it transforms into something more discrete. It is worth noting that in an earlier draft the poet wrote, “Itself in every stroke it speaks and spells” (PW, p. 115). These lines sound increasingly like an echo of Keats’s description of his own creative process, which insists that poetry “cannot be matured by law & precept, but by watchfulness in itself— That which is creative must create itself,” helpfully reminding us that the fascination with self-formation in Hopkins’s poetry cannot be wholly disengaged from the creative development of these poems.3 How the growth of a poem can “resemble the growth of the self,” Daniel Tyler has noted, is one of the “most per sis tent recognitions of the way that composition and revision are brought to thematic pertinence.” 4 In this re spect, Hopkins’s avoidance of Parnassian predictability is not only a matter of stylistic uncertainty; it is also a question of selfhood. What implications might there be for a poet’s self if effects of process and momentariness are not only key to his compositional practice but qualities sought from the poetry itself? As Finn Fordham has pointed out, if a “work of art is supposed to express something with a certain finality and precision, might an unfinished work be a sign of incoherence in the maker, a self not yet formed, not yet in possession of itself, not yet ‘achieved’?” In this re spect, an “unfinished work” would be “truer to the way that the self exists in process, never itself fully formed.”5 These questions put pressure on dominant theories of Hopkins and the self. Critics have tended to read the poet’s engagement with the self as something...