Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Weiss, Theodore

Looking at Hopkins's poems, I saw what treasures and what reinforcements I had stumbled on. First of all, his work made dear what an audacious venture poetry still could be. Furthermore, similarities in our situations must have, wittingly or not, worked on me. (Some of these, it is true, are fairly trivial, comical, fanciful, like contemporary events and properties Joyce turned into allusions to Ulysses.) For, at that time, Hopkins's life, like mine at Columbia (my version of the Jesuits!), was full of dis-ease. And probably mine exceeded his since, for all his turmoil, Hopkins did have a basic solace: a very particular God he undeviatingly believed in, even though that God's ignoring him caused his most flagrant suffering. That neglect, he was convinced, must have derived directly from his weaknesses and his wickedness.

Most of the Jesuit chores Hopkins struggled with, hoping they would bring him into God's presence and approval, not only failed, but failed, for the most part, to give him pleasure or satisfaction in themselves. His hunger for perfection could not help but anguish him, whether it was in the complexity and oddity of the sermons he delivered to his bewildered parishioners in Liverpool and elsewhere or the super-scrupulousity he succumbed to as a professor of classics. Thus as an examiner he felt obliged to devise a most extravagant grading scale, involving fractions of a point.

Add to the above the many ambitious projects on language, music, philosophy and other major topics he began with great enthusiasm and confidence but soon failed, for boredom and inadequate means, to complete, and we can understand what disappointments battered him. Then cap all this with the frustration of his poetry as it failed to find a place in the world for itself. How can we not be amazed that he lasted as long and did as well as he did? (However, it is worth noting that, according to the reports of his time, his forty-five years was the Jesuit average; for non-Jesuits forty was the mean.)

I also had a steadfast devotion: to a young woman who served as my muse. Here I was much more fortunate than Hopkins; her responsiveness in letters and visits far exceeded that of Hopkins's deity. But all kinds of obstacles dogged our relationship. As for my studies, though poetry was what I was after, the English Department was chiefly occupied with scholarship and the history of ideas; interest in the making of poets and poems was far from its corporate mind. So Victorian literature was as near as I could get to modern poetry. But as the defenders of the faith would say, how could one be sure that recent poets, even as they lacked the approbation of time and the confirmation of generations of critics, would not indeed prove to be flashes in the pan?

I, given over to voracious, mostly random reading in my high school days (usually any book other than the one assigned), had stumbled on a writer who told me what I wanted to hear: Walter Pater in The Renaissance. I must admit that the disparity between its title and the waywardness and arbitrariness of its content bewildered me. I had expected an orderly work, informative of the great personages of the Renaissance. Why present in the longest, last essay a nineteenth-century German figure, Winckelmann? And why end the book with a statement about aesthetics? I was troubled by this till I suddenly realized that the book had a profound, pervasive intention: it is not, its Conclusion makes clear, exclusively about the historical Renaissance; rather, as in the case of Winckelmann, it seeks to persuade us that, at any moment and anywhere, with apposite concentration, we can experience a renaissance.