Hopkins (Guide to the Year's Work) (Gerard Manley Hopkins) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The year 2010 seemed to be a transition year in Hopkins criticism: something of the old, something of the new, something poised between the two. The three published books focusing entirely or largely on Hopkins prove illustrative. John Parham's Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (New York: Rodopi) proposes an entirely new approach. He argues that the field he calls "green studies" is becoming more theory-driven, and that Hopkins' ideas, both in the poetry and in the prose, anticipate the latest developments in this new field. He distinguishes ecology, which he sees as a radical, even revolutionary philosophy, from more traditional and thus "shallow[er]" positions represented by terms like conservation, preservation, and environmentalism. Hopkins, so the argument runs, developed an "ecological imagination" which-and here Parham quotes political theorist Andrew Dobson approvingly-"seeks radically to call into question a whole series of political, economic, and social practices" (p. 16). The idea that so deeply a conservative man as Hopkins, conservative in his politics as much as in his religion, can be rescued from the dustbin of literary history by making him into a prototype of contemporary left-wing academics seems, well, a challenge to the imagination.