Gerard Manley Hopkins
49 quotes
Biography
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among the leading English poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature.
"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."
"NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of manIn me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be."
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed."
"On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it."
"It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither."
"For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great."
"Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson."
"I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation."
"I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism."
"I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again."
"All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose."
"Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd.<!--should--> be old or borrowed however cannot be."
"No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped."
"The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one."
"Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants."
"For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light."
"Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion."
"I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds."
"By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind."
"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest."
"It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget."
"That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows."
"A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree."
"It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty."