Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Journal and the Poetics of Natural History

Abstract

Believes Hopkins’ practice of writing a nature journal derives more than has been acknowledged from popular Victorian natural history. Claims his manner of writing wrestles with the resources of language, displaying both inventiveness with words and frustration with their incapacity for representing things, sometimes delineating objects in a language of measurement and quantification, at others animating them through metaphoric misnaming. Believes the journal is also a means of thinking and discovery, articulating Hopkins’ struggle to see while his imaginative language inflects the naming and knowing activities of nineteenthcentury natural history.