ABSTRACT
These journal notes, typically condensed and elliptical, suggest how Hopkins, Catholic convert and anti-democrat, was both a revolutionary and a reactionary poet. To begin with these complexities is to see the paradoxes of his mind at work. Highly theoretical, yet developing an idiosyncratic and self-made vocabulary which is concrete and substantive, this passage moves rapidly from epistemology to language. Hopkins is wrestling with a perennial nineteenthcentury problem, the relationship between subject and object and the representation of this relationship, or, as he puts it, the relationship between ‘us and things’. But the innovative move is that this is expressed in terms of linguistic relations. His is an ontology of grammar. The relationship of representation to things is expressed in terms of the word, the relationships of subject and object in terms of syntax. He was the first poet to develop a poetics out of a theory of the structure of language, and strangely, this rigorously modernist procedure-structuralism before its time-came about because he was the last poet to hold a strictly theological account of the logos, the authority of the Word made flesh through the incarnation of Christ. The strain of holding these two things together, and of making them compatible, marks the passionate torsions and desperate ecstasies of his work.
