A CONFLICT AND CONFLUENCE OF POETIC SENSIBILITY AND PRIESTLY COMMITMENT IN THE POETRY OF G.M. HOPKINS (Pages 07-15) by Dr. Kamal J. Dave in THE ENGLISH INDIA / ISSN: 2321-1172 (Online); 2347-2634 (Print)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Victorian poet and Jesuit Priest. Throughout his poetic pilgrimage and priestly persuasion, he felt the strain between the ascetic and aesthetic ideas. Coming across after the encountering of Tractarianism and later on inspired by Newman, Hopkins is converted to Roman Catholicism. But in meantime, Hopkins burnt some copies of his poems in the belief that writing of poetry was a self-indulgence for one who had decided to dedicate his life to God. For the next seven years he wrote no poetry and indulged himself in practicing the Jesuit orders. His silence is broken by his occasional poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. And thereby his seven years‟ poetic silence is terminated into a new rhythm which he termed as the „Sprung rhythm‟. This paper focuses on the fusion of aesthetic and ascetic thoughts that are visible correlatively in his earlier poems as well as middle period poems. But in his later poems this fusion of both the attributes pans out as a conflict between poetic sensibility and priestly commitment. Keywords: ascetic, aesthetic, fusion, self-expression, self-denial, melancholy, spiritual.