Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T00:22:02.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Down the Slant towards the Eye: Hopkins and Ecological Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Daniel Williams Open the ORCID record for Daniel Williams [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins's syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson's account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordances,” the essay assesses three scales of ecological perception in Hopkins (arboreal, atmospheric, apocalyptic) and stresses the particular relevance of the intermediate (atmospheric) scale for our experience of environmental crisis. In “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,” Hopkins recognizes the “teleconnections” bridging global systems and specific sites without remaining rooted to the local or bioregional (arboreal) or rushing to a vantage beyond planetary confines (apocalyptic).

Type
Disturbance
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Special Issue 1: Open Ecologies , Spring 2020 , pp. 127 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

With gratitude to Devin Griffiths, Deanna Kreisel, Naomi Levine, and Kathryn Tabb.

References

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W.Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Jephcott, E. F. N.. London: Verso, 1978.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Anderson, Katharine. “Looking at the Sky: The Visual Context of Victorian Meteorology.” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 3 (2003): 301–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banfield, Marie. “Darwinism, Doxology, and Energy Physics: The New Sciences, the Poetry and the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Victorian Poetry 45, no. 2 (2007): 175–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beer, Gillian. “Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination.” Comparative Criticism 13 (1991): 117–45.Google Scholar
Bohm, Arnd. “William Cowper's ‘The Poplar-Field’ and Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’: The Politics of Pastoral.” Hopkins Quarterly 30, nos. 1–2 (2003): 45–58.Google Scholar
Brown, Daniel. Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bump, Jerome. “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment.” Georgia Review 28, no. 2 (1974): 227–44.Google Scholar
Cave, Terence. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costantini, Mariaconcetta. “‘Strokes of Havoc’: Tree-Felling and the Poetic Tradition of Ecocriticism in Manley Hopkins and Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Victorian Poetry 46, no. 4 (2008): 487–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cotter, James F.Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Cotter, James F. “The Inshape of Inscape.” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 2 (2004): 195–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Darrigol, Olivier. A History of Optics: From Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Day, Brian J. “Hopkins’ Spiritual Ecology in ‘Binsey Poplars.’” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 2 (2004): 181–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunleavy, Hannah. “‘The Naked Eye’: Vision and Risk in the Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” PhD diss., University of York, 2009.Google Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Gardner, W. H.Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. 2 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, 1944, 1949.Google Scholar
Gibson, J. J.The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. “The Sky Is the Limit: The Vault of Heaven and Pictorial Vision.” In Perception: Essays in Honor of J. J. Gibson, edited by MacLeod, Robert B. and Pick, Herbert L. Jr., 84–94. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula K.Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helsinger, Elizabeth K.Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Hensley, Nathan K., and Steer, Philip, eds. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heuser, Alan. The Shaping Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Correspondence, 1852–1881. Edited by Thornton, R. K. R. and Phillips, Catherine. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks. Edited by Higgins, Lesley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Oxford Essays and Notes. Edited by Higgins, Lesley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by MacKenzie, Norman H.. 4th ed.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by Devlin, Christopher SJ. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Hutchison, Hazel. “Eye Rhyme: Visual Experience and the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Victorian Poetry 49, no. 2 (2011): 217–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jago, James. Entoptics, with Its Use in Physiology and Medicine. London: James Churchill, 1864.Google Scholar
Joule, James Prescott. “On Shooting Stars.” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 32 (1848): 349–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Gabler, Hans Walter with Steppe, Wolfhard and Melchior, Claus. New York: Vintage, 1993.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip. The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Jonathan. “An Aesthetics and Ecology of Presence.” European Romantic Review 26, no. 3 (2015): 315–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Lightman, Bernard V.Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, Norman H.Excursions in Hopkins. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Marsden, Kenneth. The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Martin, Meredith. The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Martin, Robert Bernard. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life. London: HarperCollins, 1991.Google Scholar
Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “Dendrography and Ecological Realism.” Victorian Studies 58, no. 4 (2016): 696–718.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, William. The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems. Edited by Lourie, Margaret. New York: Garland, 1981.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. “The Dark Ecology of Elegy.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, edited by Weisman, Karen, 251–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Nixon, Jude V. “‘Death blots black out’: Thermodynamics and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Victorian Poetry 40, no. 2 (2002): 131–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Jude V. “Fathering Graces at Hampstead: Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Old Trees’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars.’” Victorian Poetry 44, no. 2 (2006): 191–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Jude V. “‘Sweet especial rural scene’: Revisiting Binsey.” Hopkins Quarterly 16, nos. 1–2 (1989): 39–60.Google Scholar
Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pesic, Peter. Sky in a Bottle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Pfau, Thomas. “Rethinking the Image: With Some Reflections on G. M. Hopkins.” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 57 (2011): 117–47.Google Scholar
Phillips, Catherine. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Ronda, Margaret. “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene.” Post45, 10 June 2013, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2013/06/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene.Google Scholar
Rudy, Jason R.Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Smith, A. Mark. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Sobolev, Dennis. “Inscape Revisited.” English 51, no. 201 (2002): 219–34.Google Scholar
Strutt, John William [Lord Rayleigh].Scientific Papers. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899–1920.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Thornton, R. K. R. “Sentimental Ecology, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Trees: A Note.” John Clare Society Journal 31 (2012): 43–50.Google Scholar
Thornton, R. K. R., ed. All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Sunderland: Coelfrith, 1975.Google Scholar
Tyndall, John. “On the Blue Colour of the Sky, the Polarization of Skylight, and on the Polarization of Light by Cloudy Matter Generally.” Philosophical Magazine 37 (1869): 384–94.Google Scholar
Tyndall, John. Six Lectures on Light. London: Longmans, Green, 1873.Google Scholar
Williams, Daniel. “Stem and Skein: Order and Evolution in Hopkins.” Victorian Poetry 53, no. 4 (2015): 423–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willis, Martin. Vision, Science, and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.Google Scholar
Zaniello, Tom. Hopkins in the Age of Darwin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Zaniello, Tom. “The Sources of Hopkins’ Inscape: Epistemology at Oxford, 1864–1868.” Victorian Newsletter 52 (1977): 18–24.Google Scholar
Zaniello, Tom. “The Spectacular English Sunsets of the 1880s.” In Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, edited by Paradis, James and Postlewait, Thomas, 247–67. New York: Academy of Sciences, 1981.Google Scholar