On Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Poetic vice'

Simon Edge's glimpse into Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry through the lens of queer literature begins with an interesting pairing: Hopkins, side-by-side with Oscar Wilde. It's a historically reasonable comparison. After all, Wilde was published in the same issue of a literary journal that rejected Hopkins. At the Guardian, Edge writes, "Fun literary fact: when a Jesuit priest called Father Gerard Hopkins wrote a long, experimental poem about a shipwreck in the Thames estuary in 1876, he sent it to his order’s journal the Month, which he thought might publish it. He was wrong about that. However, in the very edition where he had hoped to see his own work, there was a short poem by a young Oxford student identified only as OFO’FWW. Trivia buffs will know those initials: this was the young Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’s first published work." Let's pick up with this story, there:

It feels like a historical oddity because the pair are otherwise so incongruous: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as we now call him, was small, pious and serious, living a life of obedience in the strictest of the Catholic orders after his conversion to the faith. Wilde was by contrast large, debauched and flippant, dazzling the smartest salons and heading for a terrible fall. That they nearly rubbed pages in a Jesuit journal was probably as close as they were ever going to come.

But the two men have more in common than that. It is clear from Hopkins’s private writings that he was also gay, and while he went to great lengths to suppress his sexuality, that very suppression infuses his work. As Professor Gregory Woods observes in his landmark A History of Gay Literature: “The more one reads Hopkins, the more one becomes convinced that his particular torture was to have realised the intensely carnal nature of his own spirituality.”

Continue at the Guardian.