Seamus Heaney’s Hopkins

Critics have often located Seamus Heaney’s response to Gerard Manley Hopkins within Heaney’s early poetry, but Heaney never fully escaped from Hopkins’s influence; he looked early and often to Hopkins for a variety of reasons that have never been articulated until now. Hopkins’s vocabulary and rhythmic voice—what Heaney called “big voltage”—electrified the entirety of Heaney’s work without making it derivative. Heaney’s ethical compass and his sense of the miraculous also owe much to Hopkins, who, like Heaney, was a Catholic, an ecologically aware poet, and a believer in transcendence. Heaney was supremely an environmentally religious writer, and his elemental poetry found confirmation in Hopkins’s deep observations of nature and conviction in the miracle of nature’s daily happenings.