ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an extended comparison of Eduard Mörike and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Both are religious poets, and both have been regarded as significant contributors to the modern lyric tradition. Like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and David Friedrich Strauss, Mörike was a product of Tübingen Stift, which he attended from 1822 until 1826. He first met Strauss in 1827, and they maintained an irregular correspondence for several decades. Hopkins encountered Idealist philosophy while an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1860s, where he was taught by, among others, Green. Hopkins throughout his adult life produced a large body of philosophical and spiritual writings, beginning in Oxford period. Hopkins's reaction to Kant was a classic reiteration of post-Kantian ideas: he diverged from Kant 'principally by not respecting Kant's prohibition upon knowledge of the noumenal self'. Hopkins's starting point, then, was the merging of phenomenal and noumenal identities that emerged in Die Religion as the inevitable development of Kant's critical thought.