Form's Philosophy: Poetry and Moral Thinking in Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation explores the kind of moral thinking at stake in the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill. For these poet-critics, poems could be a means of articulating matters of moral and spiritual value. This emerges, however, less often by propositional statement than by means of the multifaceted generic operations of poetry, drawing on a wider range of verbal, visual, sonic, and imaginative resources. At its most interesting, I propose, Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s work is characterised by strenuous, densely wrought, uneven processes of thought and feeling: a moral thinking grounded in the complexities and contrarieties of poetic and critical practice. The dissertation’s focus is therefore double. Firstly, it traces a through-line which runs from Hopkins, to Eliot, to Hill: a persisting, interconnected set of ideas and habits which—taken together across three centuries—constitute a broad, developing argument for the moral and spiritual interest of verse. Recognising connections between these poets and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, philosophers, and theologians (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Henry Newman, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, I.A. Richards, Simone Weil, Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, and many others), I argue that their poetry and criticism should be seen as a substantial contribution to long-running debates about the nature of moral reflection in an increasingly secular age. The dissertation’s central three chapters argue especially for the salience of each poet’s formal repertoire, reflecting as I believe they do distinctive and rigorous engagements with philosophy, theology, and politics. Secondly, the dissertation seeks to exemplify ways of reading which are alert to commitments of this kind, and to the processual, non-propositional character of moral thinking as it happens in poems. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism has largely focused on novels, and formalist …
abstract: This dissertation explores the kind of moral thinking at stake in the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill. For these poet-critics, poems could be a means of articulating matters of moral and spiritual value. This emerges, however, less often by propositional statement than by means of the multifaceted generic operations of poetry, drawing on a wider range of verbal, visual, sonic, and imaginative resources. At its most interesting, I propose, Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s work is characterised by strenuous, densely wrought, uneven processes of thought and feeling: a moral thinking grounded in the complexities and contrarieties of poetic and critical practice. The dissertation’s focus is therefore double. Firstly, it traces a through-line which runs from Hopkins, to Eliot, to Hill: a persisting, interconnected set of ideas and habits which—taken together across three centuries—constitute a broad, developing argument for the moral and spiritual interest of verse. Recognising connections between these poets and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, philosophers, and theologians (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Henry Newman, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, I.A. Richards, Simone Weil, Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, and many others), I argue that their poetry and criticism should be seen as a substantial contribution to long-running debates about the nature of moral reflection in an increasingly secular age. The dissertation’s central three chapters argue especially for the salience of each poet’s formal repertoire, reflecting as I believe they do distinctive and rigorous engagements with philosophy, theology, and politics. Secondly, the dissertation seeks to exemplify ways of reading which are alert to commitments of this kind, and to the processual, non-propositional character of moral thinking as it happens in poems. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism has largely focused on novels, and formalist …
author: Rizq, Michael
language: eng
keywords: Geoffrey Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Literary studies, Literature and philosophy, Literature and theology, Moral philosophy, Poetics, Poetry, T.S. Eliot
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8f1b1d78-288a-42b1-b1b4-502050d3c408/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2024-05-29
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:28Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.113762