Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Kinesthetics of Conviction

This essay explores the link in Gerard Manley Hopkins's imagination between sensations of the body and the changing textures of intensity that characterize experiences of the mind. I argue that one of the first functions of Hopkins's stylistic experiments in The Wreck of the Deutschland and later poems is to call attention to the ways in which our experiences of knowing, reasoning, and believing have parallels in bodily sensation. Hopkins's manipulations of the kinesthetic properties of language-especially the capacity of syntax to evoke sensations of pressure, balance, momentum, and tension-are directed toward a mimesis of consciousness, in which the poet strives to represent the feeling in the mind as it cranes toward an insight or relishes the renewal of conviction.