Form's Philosophy: Poetry and Moral Thinking in Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

This dissertation explores the kind of moral thinking at stake in the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill. For these poet-critics, poems could be a means of articulating matters of moral and spiritual value. This emerges, however, less often by propositional statement than by means of the multifaceted generic operations of poetry, drawing on a wider range of verbal, visual, sonic, and imaginative resources. At its most interesting, I propose, Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s work is characterised by strenuous, densely wrought, uneven processes of thought and feeling: a moral thinking grounded in the complexities and contrarieties of poetic and critical practice. The dissertation’s focus is therefore double. Firstly, it traces a through-line which runs from Hopkins, to Eliot, to Hill: a persisting, interconnected set of ideas and habits which—taken together across three centuries—constitute a broad, developing argument for the moral and spiritual interest of verse. Recognising connections between these poets and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, philosophers, and theologians (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Henry Newman, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, I.A. Richards, Simone Weil, Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, and many others), I argue that their poetry and criticism should be seen as a substantial contribution to long-running debates about the nature of moral reflection in an increasingly secular age. The dissertation’s central three chapters argue especially for the salience of each poet’s formal repertoire, reflecting as I believe they do distinctive and rigorous engagements with philosophy, theology, and politics. Secondly, the dissertation seeks to exemplify ways of reading which are alert to commitments of this kind, and to the processual, non-propositional character of moral thinking as it happens in poems. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism has largely focused on novels, and formalist criticism of poetry often resists ascribing an ethics to the features it describes. As these three poets knew, however, the formal and affective effects of verse cannot be dissociated from ethical ones; nor can a poem simply be understood as reducible to moral assertions. Rather, I argue, the close reading of poems demands attention to the layered implicatures of their words and meanings, an awareness of what might be disturbing, self-critical, or inchoate as much as appealing and mellifluous; and thus an account of verse-practice as entangled—not always straightforwardly—in moral and spiritual life. My three central chapters are preceded by a general introduction, on the philosophical and theoretical background of these questions, and on Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s shared intellectual lineage. With this in mind, the dissertation is intended not only to further understanding of the poet-critics in question, but also to exemplify certain methods and stakes in the study of modern poetics.