The body of poetry inaugurated by "The Wreck of the Deutschland" properly takes place within a complex field of linguistic thought and practice that is seen to condition its apparent idiosyncrasy when philological and poetic activity are brought into clear relation. The denseness and intensity of Hopkins's poetic language produces, when it succeeds, and ecstasy of language dwelt on in its materiality; but this dwelling on language, though so markedly individual in the poetic style in which it was realized, follows, reflects, and embodies--indeed trans-lates into the language of poetry--patterns and categories common to Victorian language-study generally. Designated most commonly by the term "philology," which had its roots in classical philology and was for a time partially identified with it, the study of language at mid-century both harbored a multiplicity of approaches and fundamental attitudes and constituted a vital and popular field of activity and interest. Hopkins's Oxford notebooks and the journals that he kept during the period of poetic quiescence that issued in the ode offer abundant evidence of the philological preoccupations that would later find expression in his poetry. But it is only by examining these preoccupations in the context in which they occurred, rather than in the schemas of internal histories of linguistics or of uniformitarian historical theories, that their full bearing on Hopkins's poetic practice can be appreciated. This context encompasses lexicology, phonology, and dialectology as well as comparative grammar and the vexed question of motivation in language. In extending the boundaries of poetic language to all current speech, standard and dialectal, in stressing and exploiting spoken rather than written language and hence the sound rather than the mark, in concentrating intensely on the individual word for both its phonetic and semantic properties, and in looking at it as linked to other words by a shared "original meaning" and, in some instances, as linked to the world by virtue of being directly expressive of it, Hopkins took part in the great and by no means univocal movement of Victorian philology. At the same time, he applied to poetry, more radically than any of his English-speaking contemporaries, a view of language made possible by that constellation of studies.
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