Hopkins Re-Constructed.

We have to give thanks to any writer who lets us read anew familiar poems and so to Justus George Lawler gratias agamus. (Lawler's polyglot style - he often uses Latin, German, and French - shows a concern for the liturgical aspects of Hopkins's world and makes a Latin response almost obligatory.) His title tells us that he dismisses literary de-construction-this book aims to "see Hopkins plain." Indeed, Lawler offers a blistering dismissal of a great deal of the criticism written on Hopkins in the last twenty-five years. Hopkins was neither an eccentric nor an anomaly for his time, Lawler argues. Particularly informative are his comparisons of Hopkins to Newman and Tennyson, which reveal a man whose supposed idiosyncrasies come out of a religious and literary tradition many of his critics simply know nothing about. (The ideal Hopkins reader would obviously be Catholic and have spent at least a year in a Jesuit novitiate.)

After destroying the lunacies of the contemporary criticism, Lawler goes on to attempt a rescue of Hopkins from one of his most recent biographers, Robert Bernard Martin (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life). Lawler wishes to dispel an "utterly dubious and tendentious theory" that Hopkins had strong homosexual desires for an extravagant Anglo-Catholic youth, Digby Macworth Dolben, and that the early poems record both a sexual encounter and a deep sense of loss at Dolben's accidental death.

Hopkins Re-Constructed requires that readers be familiar with the critical literature and with Martin's biography. Lawler even advises anyone not interested in his criticism of the critics to skip the first two chapters and go right to the reading of the poems. But even that invitation has to have its own caveat: his critical analysis uses a methodology he developed in an earlier work, Celestial Pantomime, twenty years old but reissued recently in a revised edition. A page or two of that study reappears verbatim in the work under review.

All this said, Hopkins Re-Constructed is a fine book - and Lawler must be a terrific lecturer. (The biographical note says he has taught at various middle western universities, published many books on religious matters, and contributed to Commonweal.) His style bears all the verbal signs of the lecturer's voice which jibes, unsettles, and makes extravagant claims in an effort to wake up the chap staring dully out the window. The review of the critical literature is trenchant and very funny; Lawler gesticulates in print, practically slaps the podium in outrage at the nonsense written. The case he makes against Martin's reading, using the same evidence, is persuasive enough, and one can almost feel the rush of pent-up energy as Lawler dismantles those who have invented a dark sexual side to a young man who was actually enmeshed in a struggle about whether or not to go over to Rome.

Lawler begins each of his analytical chapters with a poem, which serves to anchor the discussion and provide links for the following development. He divides the chapters into subsections headed with subtitles in teasing puns (many of which link this work to the critical methodology of his earlier book), and his exegesis is brilliant if, at times, bewildering. Lawler's passion, intelligence, and daunting breadth of reference give the book its value. He loves Hopkins's poetry, admires the man, priest and poet, and makes a strong case for Hopkins as eternal child, anima candida, one more lost in wonder at a universe which speaks to him singularly rather than one which tells him he is isolated in his singularity. He cites precursor poems by Herbert, Vaughn, Donne, Marvel, Keats, and many others and puts Hopkins in a proper relationship with the tradition.

Over and over again, Lawler can stop you in the midst of a poem with a discovery, a real disclosure. The meditative analysis of the first line of "God's Grandeur," which begins his reading of the poems, moves from a technical classification of the language used to references to Wallace Stevens and Dr. Johnson, to a distinction between "grandeur" and "glory" - especially in terms of Ignatian spirituality. A link to Teilhard de Chardin and to a sinologist, Joseph Needham, turns the analysis at the close of this four-page reflection to a characterization of Hopkins's poetic vision. This is heady and illuminating stuff. But be warned, Lawler can also befuddle: "But it is the hylomorphic complementarily engendering the transcending hypostasis that is of primary interest...." (Hillis Miller's blurb on the cover refers to the book as an "advanced introduction.")

Lawler's reading rests on a few premises. They include a sense that there is one substructure or pattern in all verse, that the tradition really links all poems, and that Hopkins was a painstaking craftsman and immersed in the literary tradition. Given these, a reader can start anywhere in Hopkins and wind up everywhere, which is not altogether a bad description of what Lawler himself does. His commanding voice is such that it is hard to resist him, decry his polysyllabic and polyglot manner as we might. Hopkins asserted in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" that "the just man justices." Justus Lawler has done justice for Father Hopkins.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.