Poetry, Philosophy, and the Sacred: An Example from Gerard Manley Hopkins | Prof. Kevin Hart

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2022

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 9, 2022 at Washington and Lee University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia where he also holds professorships in the Departments of English and French. His most recent scholarly books include Kingdoms of God (Indiana UP, 2014) and Poetry and Revelation (Bloomsbury, 2017). Among the books he has edited are Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings (Fordham UP, 2013) and The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas between Jews and Christians(Fordham UP, 2010). He is currently editing the fifth volume of a multivolume series The Bible and Literature, which will appear with Bloomsbury in 2020. His poetry is gathered in Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame UP, 2015) and Barefoot (Notre Dame UP, 2018). Among other honors, he holds an honorary doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:06.3	tamistic institute.org. I'm going to talk tonight about one poem. One poem, that's enough.
0:16.7	One lecture. And it's a poem you've got before you I hope by Gerard Manny
0:21.2	Hopkins called the Windhover and if you have ever taken a force in poetry
0:27.5	you'll know that this is a solid now usually Gerard Manny Hopkins poems and this
0:34.9	poem in particular perhaps is read in more or less a modern context.
0:40.9	That's to say, it's read either as an expression of Victorian literature, he wrote during the
0:47.6	Victorian period, or of a kind of adumbration of foretaste of literary modernism. And so discussion tends to be framed in those terms.
0:58.0	What I'm going to try tonight, though, is something rather different.
1:03.0	I'm going to try to explicate the poem in terms of patristic and medieval contexts.
1:11.6	And indeed, I'm going to go back to what I think is an extremely important moment,
1:15.6	namely the classical moment of the poem.
1:19.6	Gerard Manny Hopkins, like most Victorian, middle class schoolboys,
1:25.6	did pretty much nothing else at school but learned Greek and Latin.
1:30.3	His exercises were translated Greek into Latin, Latin into Greek, Greek into English, English into Greek, English into Greek, English into Latin and so on and so forth.
1:39.3	And then with this wide-ranging education, he went to Oxford where he studied greats, which is the study of Greek and Latin.
1:48.0	So Hopkins, unlike most of us, even if we're Catholic, spoke Latin just as well as he spoke English.
1:55.0	This is something we have to keep in mind when reading in its sense.
2:00.0	One of the things that you can't help keep in mind when reading in it seems.
2:03.1	One of the things you can't help learning when you're learning about classics and about
2:08.9	the church fathers, the Christic period and the medieval period, is you can't help learning
2:14.1	about contemplation, contemplatio, which is a particular kind of prayer which is without words.
	...

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