Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Performance of Resilience in The Face of Inner Conflict

Abstract

This article focuses on the "terrible sonnets" of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). It shows how these poems offer an insight into a particular form of agonistics. Hopkins struggles with his understanding of self, of God, and of language, transforming experience into a fundamental clash of hegemonic visions of the world. Through resilience, there is not reconciliation but a re-visioning (therefore remediatising) of the possibility of human existence, which finds its home in language. Hopkins thus works between sound and sight and places a spiritual dimension into the political conversation about the task of being human. This challenge to any reductive approach is also, the article argues, an expression of resilience.