ABSTRACT
The journal kept by Gerard Manley Hopkins at the time of his conversion abounds with grace. The entries for the months leading up to his reception into the Catholic communion in October 1866, and for the period preceding his admission to the Jesuit Novitiate in September 1868, show that the poet was keenly alive to one particular form of grace, manifested in the natural world. This chapter examines two areas where such figures come into especial focus: Hopkins's response to the poetry of John Keats, and his studies in the theological debate concerning the gratuity of divine grace. Keatsian echoes are still audible in the mature poetry of Hopkins, although his later correspondence reveals an ambivalence, emphatically absent from his early verse, with regard to the exaggerated sensuality of Keats's style. At the start of his poetic career, it is clear that Hopkins found the ornate medievalism of the narrative poems more sympathetic than the relative austerity of the Odes.
