Love Quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins lands the compliment with a blade in it: he feels Whitman as a kindred intelligence, then flinches at what that kinship implies. The line is engineered as a confession, not a tribute. “In my heart” signals instinctive recognition, a private reading more damning than any public endorsement. He isn’t saying Whitman influenced him; he’s admitting Whitman matches him at the level of temperament and desire, the mind’s secret weather.

Calling Whitman a “very great scoundrel” is doing double work. It performs Victorian moral disgust at Whitman’s expansiveness, sensuality, and democratic swagger, but it also externalizes Hopkins’s own anxiety. Hopkins was a Jesuit poet disciplined by vows and self-scrutiny, a man who could turn spiritual longing into verbal combustion. Whitman, famously unbuttoned, becomes the safe target onto which Hopkins can project the unruly parts of himself: bodily appetite, ego, a hunger for the world that doesn’t ask permission. If Whitman is a scoundrel, then the resemblance is scandalous; the scandal is the point.

The sentence’s wit lies in its asymmetry. “Any other man’s living” is grand and sweeping, then the parenthetical moral verdict snaps it shut. Hopkins stages a miniature culture war inside one line: modernity’s openness versus religiously sanctioned constraint. The unpleasantness isn’t that Whitman is bad; it’s that Hopkins suspects Whitman is a mirror, and mirrors don’t negotiate.