Darwinism, Doxology, And Energy Physics: The New Sciences, The Poetry and the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins‪.‬

In our day grand generalisations have been reached. The theory of the origin of species is but one of them. Another, of still wider grasp and more radical significance, is the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy. (1) The scientific revolution of the mid nineteenth century in its double aspect provided a matrix for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which nurtured his development as a poet responding to nature and as a religious poet. The scientific context of Hopkins' work, firmly established by Gillian Beer, Daniel Brown, Jude V. Nixon, and Tom Zaniello, makes manifest the challenge and the opportunities offered to the poet by the new sciences. In a recent article for Victorian Poetry, Nixon has stressed the significance for Hopkins' poetry of energy tropes drawn from thermodynamics: the anxiety as well as the attraction that the new physical science created for the poet. The tropes are described as admitting a dialogue between the domains of science and literature, across the vast distances which contiguity does not allow. (2) The dialogue between literature and science in Hopkins' writing forms a broad debate that crosses cultural as well as temporal barriers, creating new syntheses and paradoxes as the claims of modern science are placed against those of classical philosophy, scholasticism, and aesthetics, while all are set against the demands of religion. In what follows, I will argue that the effort and energy generated by Hopkins' response to the new sciences, to energy physics and to evolutionary biology, produced not only a polarity between attraction and reaction within his work but also a subtle counter-challenge to the perceived hegemony of scientific materialism which transformed not only his poetry but also his poetics.