Word: jesuits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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City officials in the front row almost winced before the tensed, gesticulating hands of the 38-year-old Jesuit. His voice dramatically softened: "It is not the church's job to solve all the questions of society. But we do exhort you to a crusade against passiveness and smug satisfaction." A pause, then the loudspeakers fairly rattled: "Against this and the bit of social swine that lies...
...except if to keep me awake and then without sugar . . . No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays." It was not long before Undergraduate Hopkins followed famed John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church, and within a year of graduation he entered the Jesuit novitiate. He had written poetry at Oxford, but before he took his vows he made a bonfire of his manuscripts. Worldly fame, he decided, was "a great danger . . . as dangerous as wealth . . . and as hard to enter the kingdom of heaven with." For seven years he wrote no poetry...
Then one day a German ship with five nuns aboard foundered in the Thames estuary and the nuns were lost. At 31, with the approval of his rector, Hopkins went back to poetry to write a commemorative ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland. When the editor of a Jesuit periodical rejected it, Hopkins decided never again to ask for publication. But he sent many of his poems to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Bridges, and in 1879 he wrote Bridges: "If anyone shd. like, they might be published after my death...
Exploding Verse. In the age of Tennyson, Hopkins' poetry no doubt seemed strange and obscure to the Jesuit editor who turned it down. It is not easy reading today. One reason is Hopkins' abrupt rhythm-"sprung rhythm," he called it, which he chose "because it is the nearest to the ... natural rhythm of speech." Another barrier between the casual reader and Hopkins' verse is his strange construction. He often used words out of their natural order, omitted connectives altogether. He also made up words (inscape, scapish, instress...
...feel that poetry must always be immediately intelligible. He wanted his poetry "to explode" into meaning after several readings. And he realized that his, like all good poetry, should be read aloud: "Take breath and read it with the ears . . . and my verse comes all right." As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins held down half a dozen posts before being assigned, in the last years of his life, to Dublin's University College as professor of Greek...