Editing Gerard Manley Hopkins (section)

====Erotic====
In 1970, Timothy d'Arch Smith, an antiquarian bookseller, ascribed to Hopkins suppressed homoerotic impulses which he views as taking on a degree of specificity after Hopkins met [[Robert Bridges]]'s distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian [[Digby Mackworth Dolben]], "a Christian [[Uranian (sexology)|Uranian]]".<ref>{{Cite book |last=D'Arch Smith |first=Timothy |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/127346 |title=Love in earnest: some notes on the lives and writings of English 'Uranian' poets from 1889 to 1930 |date=1970 |publisher=Routledge & K. Paul |isbn=0-7100-6730-5 |location=London |pages=188 |oclc=127346}}</ref>

In 1991, [[Robert Bernard Martin]] wrote in his biography ''Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life'', that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben's 17th birthday in Oxford in February 1865, it "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life."<ref name="martin"/>{{rp |110}} According to Robert Martin, "Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him."<ref>Martin, Robert Bernard, "Digby Augustus Stewart Dolben", ''DNB''.</ref> Martin considered it "probable that [Hopkins] would have been deeply shocked at the reality of sexual intimacy with another person."<ref name="martin">{{Cite book |last=Martin |first=Robert Bernard |title=Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life|chapter=III |date=16 June 2011 |publisher=Faber & Faber |isbn=9780571279739}}</ref>
Hopkins had composed two poems about Dolben, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End". Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed", though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.glbtq.com/literature/eng_lit2_19c,5.html |title=Joseph Cady ''English Literature: Nineteenth Century'' |access-date=1 March 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070301045049/http://www.glbtq.com/literature/eng_lit2_19c,5.html |archive-date=1 March 2007 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

[[File:Gerard Manley Hopkins.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Gerard Manley Hopkins]]
Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's high Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Hopkins never saw Dolben again, and any continuation of their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning two years later in June 1867. Hopkins's feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled by that time, but he was nonetheless greatly affected by his death. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben's death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for] many of Hopkins's best poems – impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost beloved and his muse – were the result."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kaylor |first=Michael Matthew |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/154207531 |title=Secreted desires: the major Uranians - Hopkins, Pater and Wilde |date=2006 |publisher=Masaryk University |isbn=80-210-4126-9 |location=Brno |oclc=154207531}}</ref>{{rp |401}}  Hopkins's relationship with Dolben was explored in the 2017 novel ''The Hopkins Conundrum''.<ref>{{Cite book |url=http://eye-books.com/books/the-hopkins-conundrum |title=The Hopkins Conundrum |first=Simon |last=Edge |author-link=Simon Edge |publisher=Lightning Books |date=18 May 2017 |isbn=978-1785630330}}</ref>

Some of Hopkins's poems, such as ''The Bugler's First Communion'' and ''Epithalamion'', arguably embody homoerotic themes, although the second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments.<ref>Notes No. 72. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins; now first published, edited with notes by Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.</ref> In 2006, M. M. Kaylor, argued for Hopkins's inclusion with the [[Uranian poetry|Uranian poets]], a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from prose works of [[Walter Pater]], Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams and later a lifelong friend.<ref>{{Cite book| url = https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_-Wa7SIsAQgAC/page/n219| title = <!-- pg=182 quote=Kaylor's Secret Desires. --> ''The Bugler's First Communion,'' Kaylor, ''Secreted Desires''| year = 2006| isbn = 9788021041264| last1 = Kaylor| first1 = Michael Matthew| publisher = Michael Matthew Kaylor}}</ref>{{rp|182–93}}<ref>{{Cite book| url = https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_-Wa7SIsAQgAC/page/n219| title = <!-- pg=182 quote=Kaylor's Secret Desires. --> ''Epithalamion'' in Kaylor ''Secreted Desires'' | year = 2006 | isbn = 9788021041264 | last1 = Kaylor | first1 = Michael Matthew | publisher = Michael Matthew Kaylor }}</ref>{{rp|161–205}}<ref>''Victorian Poetry'' 40.2 (2002)</ref>{{rp| 157–187}}

Some critics{{who|date=October 2022}} have argued{{when|date=October 2022}} that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious or that they can be classified under the broader category of "[[homosociality]]", over the gender, sexual-specific "homosexual" term.{{citation needed|date=October 2022}} Hopkins's journal writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminised beauty. In 2000, Justus George Lawler criticised Robert Martin's biography by suggesting that Martin "cannot see the heterosexual beam... for the homosexual biographical mote in his own eye... it amounts to a slanted [[eisegesis]]".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lawler |first=Justus George |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45831181 |title=Hopkins re-constructed: life, poetry, and the tradition |date=2000 |publisher=Continuum |page=61 |isbn=0-8264-1300-5 |location=New York |oclc=45831181}}</ref> The poems that elicit homoerotic readings can be read not merely as exercises in sublimation but as powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family and even led him to burn some poems that he felt were unnecessarily self-centred.{{citation needed|date=October 2022}} In 2000, Julia Saville viewed the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins's way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Saville |first=Julia F. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42680476 |title=A queer chivalry : the homoerotic asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins |year=2000 |isbn=0-8139-1940-1 |location=Charlottesville |oclc=42680476}}</ref>{{page needed|date=October 2022}}

[[Christopher Ricks]] noted that Hopkins engaged in a number of penitential practices, "but all of these self-inflictions were not self-inflictions to him, and they are his business – or are his understanding of what it was for him to be about his Father's business."<ref name=Ricks/> Ricks takes issue with Martin's apparent lack of appreciation of the importance of the role of Hopkins's religious commitment to his writing, and cautions against assigning a priority of influence to any sexual instincts over other factors such as Hopkins's estrangement from his family.<ref name=Ricks/> In 2009, biographer Paul Mariani found in Hopkins poems "an irreconcilable tension – on the one hand, the selflessness demanded by Jesuit discipline; on the other, the seeming self-indulgence of poetic creation."<ref name=Domestico>{{Cite web| url = https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/inscape-instress-distress?_ga=1.190997742.596395981.1472016212| last = Domestico|first= Anthony|title=Inscape, Instress & Distress|website=Commonweal|date= March 9, 2009}}</ref>