Chapter 3 - Wales

Summary

As a theology student in North Wales, Gerard Manley Hopkins immersed himself in Welsh landscapes and the Welsh language; in so doing, he developed his distinctive poetic idiom. Yet Hopkins’s responses to Wales are also charged with political and psychological complexities. Wales has a deep, contested history of invention and reinvention, and Hopkins is part of a tradition of writers who have performed identity against the backdrop of an ideological Welsh landscape. Hopkins’s bardic nom de plume, ‘Brân Maenefa’ – the name with which he signed ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – has often been understood as a jest, but it is better understood as a psychic-aesthetic identity, one whose performance gave Hopkins permission to pursue a poetic vocation. Wales was Hopkins’s ‘mother of Muses’ because he required Wales, and in a sense created Wales, as a m/otherland that, by virtue of its alterity, could mother-forth a unique poetic identity.