Chapter 33 - Journal Prose

Summary

Hopkins’s journals are usually read as source-books for his poems. Their fragmentariness smacks of the archive, seeming to position this material as purely of scholarly interest. These odds and ends are meant, it would seem, to be searched for aperçus, inscapes, what Whitman would call ‘go-befores and embryons’, later immortalized in verse. But it’s also possible to read the journals as literature in their own right: as a great poet’s utmost experiment with the possibilities of prose. Hopkins’s nature descriptions experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. He inherited an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Revealing an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water, Hopkins’s self-conscious sentences illuminate – as well as transcend – Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.