SOURCE: "A New Style," in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twayne, 1982, pp. 64-92.

[Bump is an American critic with a special interest in Hopkins's work. In the following excerpt, he offers a stylistic analysis of his poetry, focusing on the recurrence or "parallelism" of certain sounds in Hopkins's work.]

Hopkins's new style was developed in response to his question, "If the best prose and the best poetry use the same language… why not use unfettered prose?" [Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins]. He answered, "It is plain that metre, rhythm, rhyme, and all the structure which is called verse both necessitate and engender a difference in diction and in thought." The first difference is "concentration and all which is implied by this. This does not mean terseness nor rejection of what is collateral nor emphasis nor even definiteness." Indeed, though Hopkins achieved a conciseness and concentration unusual among Victorian poets, he did so not by rejecting but by inviting collateral meanings of words, that is, not by an exclusiveness but by an inclusiveness of meaning. For him a word was not limited to one of its meanings: "every word may be considered as the contraction or coinciding-point of its definitions." Thus, if the first principle of his new poetics is concentration, the second is multiple levels of meaning or, to borrow a term from science, multivalence.

Poetry differs from prose by a greater concentration not only of meaning, moreover, but also of word-music and imagery, according to Hopkins. Inspired by the pervasiveness of parallelism throughout the Bible, Hopkins reduced these third and fourth features of his poetry to his principle of parallelism or recurrence in the sounds and thought in a poem:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism… in rhythm, the recurrence of a certain sequence of syllables, in meter, the recurrence of a certain sequence or rhythm, in alliteration, in assonance and in rhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is to beget a recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought and, speaking roughly and rather for the tendency than the invariable result, the more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense. And moreover parallelism in expression tends to beget or passes into parallelism in thought … metaphor, simile, parable, and so on, where the effect is sought in likeness of things, and antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is sought in unlikeness.

Such a definition of poetry supplies the broad parameters within which Hopkins developed the style that made him a great English poet, a style developed primarily between 1868 and 1875, seven years during which, paradoxically, he composed very few poems. The birth of the new style is apparent, however, in revisions of his earlier Pre-Raphaelite poems, especially "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," and in the only new poems of this period, "Ad Mariam" and "Rosa Mystica." These initial attempts to discover his "authentic cadence" illustrate the practical effects of his definition of poetry and, relatively simple in their own right, they show us how to approach the more difficult poems which followed.

Hopkins's revisions of "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," for example, demonstrate concisely how his definition of poetry as parallelism in sound led to his conception of poetry as speech, music, dramatic performance, and sacrament. "Rosa Mystica," on the other hand, illustrates clearly the answering parallelism in the thought in a poem, especially that special kind of recurrence described by such terms as "type," "antitype," and "archetype" which imply a multiplicity of "vertical" parallels and movements between God and the world as well as a sense of mystery and, at times, even obscurity of meaning. "Rosa Mystica" also epitomizes Hopkins's conception of poetry as discourse on a higher level of generality than prose and illustrates how Hopkins's conventional imagery restricts his originality primarily to his parallelism in sound, that is, his word-music.

…..

Confronted with the example of Christina Rossetti's songs of heaven, Hopkins began to consider which of the senses is most important in our response to words: seeing or hearing. Ever since the invention of the alphabet, the initial visualization of language in the Western world, there has been a propensity to regard literature as essentially a visual art. "Oral Literature" is in fact a contradiction in terms, for "literature" means "letters." Hopkins eventually became aware, however, of the danger of this overemphasis on the role of the eye in communication and began to modify the visual models of language he had inherited from Keats, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelites in order to place more emphasis on the role of the ear.

Ironically it was his revision of "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" that generated much of his distinctive auditory poetics, including his first use of sprung rhythm, his first dramatic monologue, and his special use of word-music to "beget" metaphor. Though the title, "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," proclaims the poem's genre as the verbal initation of the visual arts, Hopkins's revisions invoke the conventions of rival genres appealing to the ear more than the eye, that is, appealing more to the Victorians' fondness for reading aloud than to their love of word-painting, thus emphasizing the poem as speech, drama, and music.

Hopkins's aim was to revitalize the medieval legend of St. Dorothea. Just before her martyrdom, a lawyer named Theophilus jeeringly asked Dorothea to send him some fruits and flowers from the heavenly garden she believed awaited her. He converted when an angel delivered them. This legend became a favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites: Dante and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and A. C. Swinburne had all represented St. Dorothea in their art before Hopkins took her up in 1864. When a subject such as this was represented in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, moreover, they frequently accompanied it with a poem for the painting in Dante Rossetti's manner, often inscribed in the frame of the painting itself.

Hopkins's title reminds us that he originally wanted to be a painter and a poet after the fashion of Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. They obviously inspired both his subject and his choice of the genre of poems-for-pictures. Hopkins differed from them by substituting lilies, larkspurs, and a quince for the roses and apples in the legend, and by developing the exchange between Theophilus and Dorothea and/or her angel. His special emphasis on the role of speech and music, however, two auditory effects as likely to compete with visual sensations as to complement them, most clearly distinguished him from the Pre-Raphaelites.

Hopkins soon perceived that the ancient definition of poetry as a speaking picture is intrinsically dialectical, a contradition in terms. His decision to stress speech made his poem-for-a-picture not merely independent of an imaginable picture but distinctively different from any picture. As he put it, "the sensations of the eye are given in space, those of the ear in time." Speech, being invisible, with no existence in space, tended to force the imaginary picture of his title back into that world of time from which the spatial arts seem to escape.

Hopkins thus discovered how language has its own intrinsic generic propensities, especially a tendency to generate drama. In his first revision Hopkins's subtitle stressed the presence of two different speakers in the poem, and in his second he actually broke the poem up into five separate speeches. This incipient attraction to drama is more obvious in his plays—Floris in Italy, Castara Victrix, and St. Winefred's Well—but they, along with his more dramatic versions of "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," remain unfinished. His theatrical tendencies, like those of many Victorian poets, blossomed instead in his lyrics, in the interpolated "oh's," "ah's," and exclamation marks which, like the outbursts of the narrator in Dickens's novels or the histrionic gestures of Victorian melodrama, emphasize climactic moments. In "The Windhover" and "The Starlight Night" (1877), for instance, his interjections dramatize his excited discoveries of unusually felicitous sacramental symbols.

This love of drama led to the invention of "sprung rhythm" and the sacrifice of many of the painterly effects in "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" (I). Seeking the more dramatic conciseness and directness of the sense-stress rhythms of Renaissance verse drama, Hopkins replaced regular rhythms in the poems such as "I am so light, I am so fair" and "And at the basket that I bear," with the more concise "sprung" rhythms, "I am so light and fair" and "With the basket I bear" (II). A comparison of the original lines with their revisions reveals the most striking feature of sprung rhythm: the freedom to vary the number of unaccented syllables, allowing more conciseness, and a more dramatic stress on the accented syllables. It is a rhythm, as Hopkins said of his use of it in "Harry Ploughman," "which is altogether for recital, not for perusal (as by nature verse should be)" [The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges].

This realization of the dramatic potential of language encouraged the idea that poetry should not be merely word-painting, but also, as Wordsworth put it, "man speaking to men." This archaic sense of literature as "speaking," and thus reading as "reading aloud," the common usage in ancient and medieval cultures, was revived in the nineteenth century, apparently as a response to the accelerating mechanization of printing. Even novels were read aloud to families and large audiences. Philip Collins reminds us that a hundred years ago "much current literature was apprehended in this way—was indeed written with such a reception in mind," and thus "many people met contemporary literature as a group or communal, rather than an individual experience."

Hopkins in particular must have been conscious of the many parallels between the communal experiences of literature and religious ritual. At the time he was revising his Dorothea poem he was agonizing about his religious vocation and no doubt was aware that some of the most popular Victorian public readers were clergymen—indeed, two of the most successful were Anglican priests who had gone over to Rome. Moving in the same direction himself, Hopkins was in fact experiencing two simultaneous and related conversions; he felt the necessity of restoring not only the medieval religion but also some of the oral traditions with which it was identified.

Hence in his version of the legend of St. Dorothea Hopkins concentrated on the speeches that led to the conversion of Theophilus and, in the process, developed his theory of sprung rhythm. As he explained to his brother Everard in 1885, sprung rhythm

gives back to poetry its true soul and self. As poetry is emphatically speech, speech purged of dross like gold in the furnace, so it must have emphatically the essential elements of speech. Now emphasis itself, stress, is one of these: sprung rhythm makes verse stressy; it purges it to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm as poetry in general is brighter than common speech.

In his revisions of the Dorothea poem, Hopkins uses sprung rhythm to stress the "parley," the debate between Dorothea and Theophilus, which ironically had the effect of the delivery of a "writ" to the pagan Theophilus, himself the Protonotary, writer of writs, now converted by the spoken rather than the written word.

Hopkins's representation of the "parley" making its "market here as well," moreover, increases our sense of a discussion with an audience, both inside and outside the poem, which is to be persuaded to strike a bargain, "to make market," to trade, to buy. This dramatization of the role of the audience led to the explicit exhortations and question and answer technique in the sequel to the Dorothea poem, "The Starlight Night": "It is all a purchase, all is a prize. / Buy then! Bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows."

In many of Hopkins's subsequent poems the performance of the poem, the "parley" between the poem's speaker and the audience, is clearly intended to be the delivery of a "writ" for the audience's conversion. In other words, Hopkins replaced the modern axiom of the autonomy of the artistic imagination with the older idea of poetry as rhetoric. It can be argued that most of Hopkins's poetic techniques were developed to serve this clearly proselytical purpose. His most "modern" innovation, sprung rhythm, was obviously developed primarily for its rhetorical and oratorical potential: "Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all," Hopkins wrote to Bridges, "Because it is… the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical…. My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so." Along with the rhythm, the highly mnemonic sound structure of Hopkins's poems and their commonplace themes all suggest deep roots in the ancient tradition which defined poetry as a special kind of rhetoric, a tradition large enough to embrace even poems-for-pictures, for it prized enargeia (pictorial vividness) and ecphrasis (giving speech to an art object).

As his commitment to medievalism in religion and art increased in the 1860s, Hopkins conceived of poetry not only as speech and drama but also as music. Music, the least representational, the most spiritual of the arts, generally replaced painting as the sister of poetry in the Middle Age. Thomas Aquinas's hymn, "Adoro Te Supplex," for instance, which Hopkins translated, asserts of God: "Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived; / How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed" ("S. Thomae Aquinatis Rhythmus," undated). Aquinas's emphasis on the ear was reinforced in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke and Gotthold Lessing, who reaffirmed Aristotle's assertion that poetry belongs with music as an art of temporal movement. This thesis was also supported by the German critics most important to Hopkins, those who promulgated romanticism as a medievalist movement animated by Christian spiritualism: Johann Herder, W. H. Wackenroder, Novalis, and the Schlegels. They praised music as the nonmimetic, expressive art to which lyric poetry should aspire.

The English romantics adapted their musical analogy, often in Aeolian harp imagery, and John Keble consecrated it for the Victorians. Thus, while Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" epitomizes the romantic attraction to the visual arts, many other nineteenth-century poems emphasize affinities between poetry and music—so many, in fact, that romanticism has been defined as the shift from ut pictura poesis to ut musica poesis. In his revisions of his Dorothea poem, Hopkins was reconstructing this basic pardigm of romanticism.

He unified his own poem-for-a-painting through word-music rather than word-painting. Recognizing that we need to integrate a poem (which we usually apprehend first in discrete units) more than a painting (which we first perceive in one glance), Hopkins unified his poems with what he called "verbal parallelisms." Recurrent patterns of consonance and assonance, along with the audible rhythms of structural parallelism which he called "the figure of grammar," replace the Pre-Raphaelite painters' unifying techniques of ornamental designs and color harmonies. Perhaps the most obvious examples are the initial images of "a basket lined with grass" (I-III), in which "basket" and "grass" are audibly linked by a assonance and s consonance, and the later image of a "quince in hand" (I) which is integrated by i assonance and n consonance. Similarly, it is the audible rhythm of structural parallelism ("the figure of grammar") that narrows the focus from St. Dorothea's basket of flowers to her lilies: "flowers I carry… Lilies I shew" (I). In addition to this kind of fugal iteration of structure, Hopkins also repeats sounds like "nor" to unify his picture, or in this case its disappearance: "We see nor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy" (I).

The result is that although in fact we never see her, when the poem is read aloud we hear her music and that becomes the "message" of the poem. The impression of unity created by the word-music in "For a Picture of St. Dorothea" conveys the beauty of the final union with God in the realm in which Dorothea is "sphered": that heaven of "choice celestial music, equal to the motion of the spheres," invoked in Massinger's Renaissance drama of Dorothea, The Virgin Martyr (V, ii).

It was no doubt because music had such spiritual as well as formal powers that the musical analogy eventually became central to Hopkins's definition of poetry. He speculated that originally "music and verse were one" and such words as "measure," "timbre," "melody," "air," "cadence," "rest," "modulation," and "pitch" pervade his discussions of poetry. Toward the end of his life he even preferred musical to rhetorical models for the performance of his poems: "above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as a living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on rhyme, and other marked syllables, and so on. This sonnet should be almost sung: it is most carefully timed in tempo rubato."

By aspiring to the condition of music, romantic poetry also sought to minimize the referential quality of language (which Victorian word-painting depended on), and thus lent itself to Hopkins's definition of poetry as "speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake—and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on)." In his own poetry Hopkins "dwells on" fugal repetition of the auditory inscape "to be heard for its own sake." Conventional syntax and clarity are consistently sacrificed for such musical effects, and the result in, say, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo," is an operatic performance which clearly subordinates the referential qualities of language to the musical.

This emphasis on language qua language and Hopkins's initial attraction to visual metaphors such as "the shape" of a poem, has naturally led us to associate his theories with modern criticism and its basic tenet of art for art's sake. The result, however, is often a misunderstanding of Hopkins's aims and methods. Many twentieth-century formalist critics, with basically spatial paradigms of language, naturally assume that language was primarily visual for Hopkins too and therefore the essence of poetry for him was writing and reading silently, alone.

Yet Hopkins said that "such verse as I do compose is oral, made away from paper, and I put it down with repugnance." Hopkins's increasing emphasis on auditory rather than spatial effects often means that his poetry, for all its apparent modernity, cannot be read the way we normally read modern literature, as Hopkins himself discovered to his surprise: "When on somebody returning me the 'Eurydice,' I opened and read some lines, reading, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right." "The Loss of the Eurydice" his other shipwreck poem, was also on his mind when he wrote to Everard: "I am sweetly soothed by your saying that you could make anyone understand my poem by reciting it well. That is what I always hoped, thought, and said; it is my precise aim. And thereby hangs so considerable a tale, in fact the very thing I was going to write about Sprung Rhythm in general."

Hopkins's considerable tale concerns the relationship between poetry and music. He took liberties with traditional grammar and diction in order to transform speech into something like music. "Some matter and meaning is essential" but we are to concentrate on the musical "shape" of the words, until the music itself becomes meaningful. Encouraged by onomatopoetic etymologies of contemporary linguists, Hopkins believed that similarity of sound in words "begets" similarity of meaning, that phonic harmony generates semantic harmony. Hopkins's choice of the word "begets," echoing the Nicene Creed's "Begotten not made, one in Being with," emphasizes not only the casual relationship, but the essential unity of sound and meaning.

This concept of the higher meaningfulness of the music of a poem had many nineteenth-century precedents. The romantics revived Pythagoras's theory of the music of the world, what Boethius called musica mundana, because they believed its sole aim is the Infinite. Pater defined this Pythagorean and Platonic "music of the spheres in its largest sense, its completest orchestration" as "the harmonious order of the whole universe." While contemporary musicologists related their studies to this music of the spheres and other mystical paradigms, Wordsworth asserted that "the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable" on top of Mt. Snowdon was "felt by the starry heavens."

The Platonic emphasis on the rhetorical and ethical effects of man-made music, what Boethius called musica humana, also remained popular. The romantics recalled Longinus's assertion that harmonious word-music makes us receptive to sublimity, and Newman claimed that the "perfection of the Intellect" has "almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres." Similar ideas affected theorists both as modern as Valéry, who felt that the aim of music in poetry was to produce an extraordinary harmony in the listener, and as reactionary as the nineteenth-century medievalists, who resurrected many other traditional connotations of verbal harmony. Hopkins's word-music in his poem on Dorothea and her angel, for instance, may well be a response to Anna Jameson's insistence, in the book that inspired the cult of St. Dorothea, that "there is nothing more beautiful, more attractive in Art than the representation of angels" as the singers of the "music of the spheres."

Hopkins's word-music was designed to "beget a recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought," moreover, ultimately a recurrence of the music of heaven. These connotations of harmony in poetry suggest how Hopkins's word-music was designed to convey that sense of the possibility of a radically different order of time and experience that is one of the goals of most religions. Hopkins's Dorothea poem shows how, from the beginning of his career, even in his most conventional, mimetic phase, Hopkins was interested in representing not only nature but that which seemed to miraculosuly deviate from nature. Religion encouraged Hopkins to represent this independent reality, this world unto itself, this time out of time. "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," like so many other Hopkins poems, is the music of this other word of centuries of religious traditions as well as the song of a particular self.

Ironically, while revising his poem-for-a-picture in search of new ways to tap the poetic power of these traditions, Hopkins's most important discovery was that the ear was more important than the eye. He sensed that the medieval age which his imaginary "picture" evoked was more alive than his own to the power of the spoken word, in the sacraments and in its oral traditions generally. Such traditions, as Walter Ong has shown [in The Presence of the Word, 1970], consisting of audible rather than visualized words, make the world more personal, for spoken words invoke the presence of speakers.

It is a sign of the ability Hopkins acquired to revive those traditions that his poems written for performance often evoke a world inhabited by personified presences, a vitalistic world in which all objects are animated by powers "deep down" inside them, a world very much like that resurrected by his ultimate revision of the Dorothea poem: "The Starlight Night." In that poem as in so many others, Hopkins taps the extraordinary power of this vital oral tradition with a virtuoso auditory performance which rejuvenates and energizes the ancient metaphors. He extends their life in time in another sense as well: when the metaphors of "The Starlight Night" are spoken aloud, as they should be, they inevitably seem more successive and less simultaneous, for the tongue is much slower than the eye. But only by performing this and other poems by Hopkins aloud can a reader apprehend this aspect of his metaphors and feel the primary effect he aimed at in all his poetry: the parallelism of his sounds actually "begetting" the parallelism of his images, the integration of his word-music activating and reinforcing the unifying power of the metaphors.

Hopkins thus resurrected the original meaning of the term "sonnet"—like "sonata" it means "to be sounded or played." That his poems are based on a theory of poetry as performance was the rest of that "considerable tale" he adumbrated in his letter to Everard in 1885:

Every art then and every work of art has its own play or performance… books play, perform, or are played and performed when they are read; and ordinarily by one reader, alone, to himself, with the éyes only…. Poetry was originally meant for either singing or reciting; a record was kept of it; the record could be, was, read, and that in time by one reader, alone, to himself, with his eyes only. This reacted on the art: what was to be performed under these conditions for these conditions ought to be and was composed and calculated. Sound-effects were intended, wonderful combinations even; but they bear the marks of having been meant for the whispered, not even whispered, merely mental performance of the closet, the study and so on…. This is not the true nature of poetry… till it is spoken it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself….

Hopkins's use of the word "perform" here is full of echoes of the King James Bible familiar to most Victorians. These echoes include that sense of fulfilment of prophecy so basic to the typological imagination: "For I am the LORD I will speak, and the word that I shall speak shall come to pass… in your days… will I say the word, and will perform it" (Ezek. 12:25).

But the biblical "perform" is not limited to this typological meaning; it conveys all the connotations of speech as act: "I am the LORD that… confirmeth the word of his servant, and performeth the counsel of his messangers; that saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited; and to the cities of Judah, ye shall be built,… That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers; That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure; even saying unto Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (Isa. 44:24-28). One of the reasons that the Bible is the book of Western civilization is that it is the one most in tune with those original oral traditions which endow our language with great power. The source of the ultimate performatives in our language, the Bible is the drama of word as event, speech as act, from the creation ("And God said, Let there be light: and there was light") to the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Biblical words are clearly kinetic, dynamic—they make things happen.

The emphasis is of course on speech, not writing, for the Hebrew tradition is oriented to the ears, not the eyes. The God of the ten commandments is heard, not seen: "And the LORD spake unto you out of the midst of the fire; ye hear the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice: And he declared unto his covenant, which he commanded you to perform" (Deut. 4:12-13). Other echoes of the word "perform" also stress the effect of the voice of the invisible God on the ear: "And the LORD said to Samuel; Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of everyone that heareth it shall tingle. In that day I will perform" (Isa. 3:11-12).

To move closer to Hopkins's own situation, much of this sense of the power of the word is transferred to the poet when the word of the Lord comes to him and he accepts the role of the prophet with his "Amen" ("So be it"): "The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Hear ye the words of this covenant, and speak unto the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem; And say unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel; cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant… Obey my voice, and do them, according to all which I command you; so shall ye be my people, and I will be your God: That I may perform the oath that I have sworn unto your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day. Then answered I, and said, So be it, O LORD" (Jer. 11:1-5).

So far we may seem to have stayed within the oral tradition, though the Bible is its visual transcription, but the biblical echoes of the word "perform" include explicit instructions on how to perform a written text: "And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book" (2 Kings 23:3). In this model of reading, the performance of the words of a text demands the complete participation of the reader; his heart and soul are to embrace the heart and soul of the text: "I have inclined my heart to perform thy statutes alway, even unto the end" (Ps. 119:112). It is not enough to read the text, or even to speak it aloud; one must pour one's whole being into the performance of it: "That which has gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform" (Deut. 23:23); "Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that which ye have" (2 Cor. 8:11).

This sense of the text as the script for a performance is clearly at the other end of the spectrum from the idea of the text as merely a visual object. Hopkins soon discovered that to read with the eyes only is to be deaf and dumb, to have one's organs closed to the magical or miraculous power of words in performance. In his sermon, "Cure of the Deaf and Dumb Man; Ephphetha," for instance, Hopkins recalls that "having made the organs ready to hear and speak he looked up to heaven and groaned…. And said Ephphetha, Be opened—The evangelist tells us the very word which had this magical or rather miraculous effect…. Much more should we admire what Christ has done for us—made us deaf hear, if we will hear… made us dumb speak."

Hopkins's literary goal was a new genre of spoken lyric emphasizing poetry's affinities with speech and drama rather than the visual arts. Anticipating H. Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, he suggested how the phonograph, which had been invented only seven years before, could help restore the human voice to literature:

I look on this as an infinite field and very little worked. It has this great difficulty, that the art depends entirely on living tradition. The phonograph may give us one, but hitherto there could be no record of fine spoken utterance…. the natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry, which is speech, has not been enough cultivated, and should be. When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it it would be, I am persuaded, a lovely art…. With the aid of the phonograph each phrase could be fixed and learned by heart like a song.

As I have suggested elsewhere, the poetics expressed in this letter suggest our need to reevaluate how we teach literature and how we communicate generally.