“Hack and Rack the Growing Green”

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s environmental concerns are not only ecological but also “ecotheological” in that he addresses both the relation of organisms to one another and their connection to divinity. Ecotheology (creation-centered approaches to theology) differs from ecocriticism (literary criticism centered on environmental awareness), and there is a tradition of ecotheological thought within Catholicism, ranging from St. Francis of Assisi to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Pope Francis. In poems like “Binsey Poplars,” “As kingfishers catch fire,” and “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins’s Christian symbolism and ecotheological themes demonstrate that, for him, nature’s importance stems from its sacredness. These Hopkinsian strands are picked up by three contemporary poets—Denise Levertov, Pattiann Rogers, and Martha Silano—who, though not as orthodox as Hopkins in their religious views, nevertheless share his ecotheological impulses. These writers represent, together with their Jesuit predecessor, “a particular poetic community” that, like the God of Genesis, sees an inherent goodness and value in creation. These contemporary poets are examples of the many writers who have echoed Hopkins’s ecotheological concerns.

The Fire That Breaks

The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins’s continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers—including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Gurney, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Charles Wright, Maurice Manning, and Ron Hansen—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, modern novelists, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world’s leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the collection examines both known and unexpected affinities. The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.

‘A Forming Poem’: Towards a Process Poetics

Even as theopoetics turns to literary structures and grammatology to arbitrate between an Absolute and Absolute meaninglessness, John Caputo and David Miller are careful to separate its project from theopoetry’s representations of God. But this division makes little provision for figures like Denise Levertov, whose work suggests that the religious question is an inherently aesthetic one, that this arbitration can happen through representation. This article reads Levertov’s ‘The Tide’ in order to define a mode of signification unbound to spiritual fixity. Through its characterisation of both form and faith as process, ‘The Tide’ offers a new way of negotiating the relationship between literature and theology.

Who is Jesus Now? Maxims and Surprises

This article is a very personal attempt, within the horizon opened up by the Prologue of the Gospel of John and the past century of Christian theology, to articulate seven maxims in answer to the question, Who is Jesus now? The maxims focus on the Gospel story, analogical thought and imagination, living before the face of Jesus, covenantal commitment, being sent as Jesus was sent, reconciliation, and continuing surprises. Key references are to the Gospel of John, Hans Frei, Frances Young, Richard Hays, David Tracy, Denise Levertov, and Jean Vanier, and to ecumenism and Scriptural Reasoning, which relates to all the maxims.