ellauri095.html on line 207: Nevertheless, even after he became a Jesuit he continued to cultivate an acquaintance with the visual arts through drawing and attendance at exhibitions, and this lifelong attraction to the visual arts affected the verbal art for which he is remembered. In his early poetry and in his journals wordpainting is pervasive, and there is a recurrent Keatsian straining after the stasis of the plastic arts.
ellauri095.html on line 512: The Wreck of the Deutschland became the occasion for Hopkins’s incarnation as a poet in his own right. He broke with the Keatsian wordpainting style with which he began, replacing his initial prolixity, stasis, and lack of construction with a concise, dramatic unity. He rejected his original attraction to Keats’s sensual aestheticism for a clearly moral, indeed a didactic, rhetoric. He saw nature not only as a pleasant spectacle as Keats had; he also confronted its seemingly infinite destructiveness as few before or after him have done. In this shipwreck he perceived the possibility of a theodicy, a vindication of God’s justice which would counter the growing sense of the disappearance of God among the Victorians. For Hopkins, therefore, seeing more clearly than ever before the proselytic possibilities of art, his rector’s suggestion that someone write a poem about the wreck became the theological sanction he needed to begin reconciling his religious and poetic vocations.
ellauri095.html on line 516: The relationship between Hopkins and his father reveals important early instances of creative collaboration and competition within the family. Hopkins copied eleven of the poems from his father’s volume A Philosopher’s Stone into his Oxford notebooks. In those poems his father expressed a Keatsian dismay over science’s threat to a magical or imaginative response to nature.
ellauri095.html on line 533: His religious consciousness increased dramatically when he entered Oxford, the city of spires. From April of 1863, when he first arrived with some of his journals, drawings, and early Keatsian poems in hand, until June of 1867 when he graduated, Hopkins felt the charm of Oxford, “steeped in sentiment as she lies,” as Matthew Arnold had said, “spreading her gardens to the moonlight and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.” Here he became more fully aware of the religious implications of the medievalism of Ruskin, Dixon, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Inspired also by Christina Rossetti, the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of God in the Eucharist, and by the Victorian preoccupation with the fifteenth-century Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola, he soon embraced Ruskin’s definition of “Medievalism” as a “confession of Christ” opposed to both “Classicalism” (“Pagan Faith”) and “Modernism” (the “denial of Christ”).
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