ellauri095.html on line 453: Christina Rossetti became for Hopkins the embodiment of the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford Movement, and Victorian religious poetry generally. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by her example and succeeded, unbeknownst to her and to the critics of his time, in becoming a rival far greater than any of her contemporaries.
ellauri095.html on line 455: Their rivalry began with Hopkins’s response to her poem “The Convent Threshold.” Geoffrey Hartman was clearly on the right track when he suggested in the introduction to Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) that “Hopkins seems to develop his lyric structures out of the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision. In his early ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’; and ‘St. Dorothea’; he may be struggling with such poems as Christina Rossetti’s ‘Convent Threshold’; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ poems in which the poet stands at a lower level than the vision, or is irrevocably, pathetically distanced.” Such poems were the essence of medievalism in poetry according to William Morris, who felt that Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” was the germ from which all Pre-Raphaelite poetry sprang. Standing beyond Keats, however, the primary source was Dante. Christina Rossetti clearly alludes to Beatrice’s appeal to Dante in “The Convent Threshold”:
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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