Hopkins's poetics of speech sound : sprung rhythm, lettering, inscape / James I. Wimsatt.

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A well-researched and highly detailed book, Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound asserts major significance for a relatively neglected aspect of this important poet's writings.

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CHOICE Review

Wimsatt (emer., Univ. of Texas, Austin) argues that Gerard Manley Hopkins is not only a great poet but also a major literary theorist. Focusing on Hopkins' prose writings--that is, on comments scattered throughout his journals, correspondence, poetry manuscripts, and essays, particularly an essay titled "Poetry and Verse"--the author demonstrates that Hopkins formulated a "coherent and philosophically sophisticated" theory of poetry, one (as the subtitle hints) distinguished by use of neologisms. At the heart of the theory, writes Wimsatt, is the poet's preoccupation with "speech sound"--i.e., rhythm, alliteration, assonance, end-rhyme, and other phonic affinities. Hopkins' most compelling claim is that "sound patterns" convey meanings--affective or sensory meanings--over and above those expressed by the lexical or grammatical sense of words. In connecting Hopkins' ideas to classical poetry and rhetoric, Wimsatt offers a valuable work of scholarship--one more cogent than Michael Sprinker's A Counterpoint of Dissonance: The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (CH, Apr'81) and Maria Lichtmann's The Contemplative Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (CH, Oct'89, 27-0817). Though narrow in focus, this book belongs in most academic collections. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. D. Kummings University of Wisconsin--Parkside