Don't Be Afraid to Try: Ogres and Poetry

By Eric Hanna, S.J.

We've all had that moment of fear when asked to do something creative.  Fear tells us that if we risk expressing something we are not quite sure of, others will tear it down simply because they don't understand.  This pattern leads us to avoid trying new things.  It is a pattern that students at Regina's Mother Theresa Middle School are trying to break.

When I first started helping out with an after-school program of creative writing and poetry, some students were quite eager to try expressing themselves.  But there were always a few who froze.  They wrote nothing at all, or non-committal phrases about safe topics: movies they'd seen, videogames, etc.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and Inscape

By Adam Hincks, S.J.

Image: micknailspoetry

Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realise you. Do any human beings ever realise life while they live it?―every, every minute? The saints and poets, maybe―they do some.  –Thornton Wilder

I recently read the biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life by Robert Martin. It is a detailed portrait of this great Victorian poet and is especially engrossing since Martin takes a heavily psychological approach to his subject. While on balance I appreciated this tack, I sometimes found myself wondering how much the Hopkins presented in the book has been accurately reconstructed from his letters and diaries, and how much was supplied by Martin’s imagination. It is hard to tell. But it is fairly clear that many aspects of his life were, as the subtitle suggests, “very private”: not in the sense that he shared nothing with anyone else―it is thanks to his extensive correspondence that we know as much as we do about him―but rather that he enjoyed solitude, writing poetry, taking long walks in the country and above all communing with nature.

One of Hopkin’s greatest delights was contemplating the quiddity or "thisness" of things. He had an intense awareness of the irreducible uniqueness of each thing and coined the word “inscape” to refer to this property of nature. In a Platonic dialogue On the Origin of Beauty, he attempts to give a systematic account of how beauty arises through the disarming, slight lacks of symmetry in natural objects; half-way through, the treatise turns into a consideration of the quality of poetry. It is a little work that is well worth reading.