Gerard Manley Hopkins' Journal and the Poetics of Natural History‪.‬

Gerard Manley Hopkins' practice of writing a nature journal derives more than has been acknowledged from popular Victorian natural history. But his manner of writing wrestles with the resources of language, as the journal displays both inventiveness with words and frustration with their incapacity for representing things. Enacting and testifying to the challenges of visual perception, the journal delineates objects in a language of measurement and quantification, and animates them through metaphoric misnaming. Questioning and sifting visual evidence as well as recording observations, the journal is also a means of thinking and discovery. A treasury of found objects and a study in how to represent nature under difficulties, Hopkins' journal articulates his struggle to see while his imaginative language inflects the naming and knowing activities of nineteenth-century natural history. **********