Hopkins' idealism
Subtitle: philosophy, physics, poetry
By: Daniel Brown.
Contributors: Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844-1889.
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 345
Subjects: Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844-1889 -- Philosophy; Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1844-1889 -- Knowledge -- Science; Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Philosophy in literature; Idealism in literature; Physics in literature; Metaphysics in literature
Description: The conventional picture of the young Hopkins as a conservative High-Church ritualist is starkly contested by this study which draws upon his unpublished Oxford essays on philosophy to reveal a boldly speculative intellectual liberal. Less concerned with Christian factionalism than with countering contemporary threats to faith itself, Hopkins' thought is seen to follow that of his teachers Benjamin Jowett and T.H.

Green, who turned to Kant and Hegel to vouchsafe the grounds of Christian belief against contemporary scientism. Hopkins' personal metaphysic of 'inscape' and 'instress', which has long been recognized as crucial to the understanding of his poetry, is traced here to concepts derived from the 'British Idealism' he encountered at Oxford and the new energy physics of the 1850s and 1860s. By locating his thought at the intellectual avant-garde of his age, the striking modernity of his poetry need no longer be seen as an historical anomaly.

The book offers radical rereadings not only of his metaphysics and theology, but also of his best-known poems.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-339) and index.