Aging & Wisdom Quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins is drawing a line in the sand against the museum-glass version of poetry: language embalmed into “poetic” diction, safely antique, politely remote. “Current language heightened” is his compromise and his dare. Don’t retreat into yesterday’s finery; take the speech of your own moment and charge it with voltage. The key word is “heightened,” not “current.” He isn’t arguing for plainness or reportage. He’s insisting that art begins in the living tongue but doesn’t end there. Poetry, for Hopkins, is not a separate dialect; it’s the everyday world made strange enough to be seen.

The subtext is polemical. Victorian poetry was thick with inherited ornaments and stock phrases that signaled “literary” the way lace signals “formal.” Hopkins, a Jesuit convert writing under strict self-scrutiny, wants a language as morally serious as it is sensually exact. His own innovations - sprung rhythm, compound words, compressed syntax, the muscular stress patterns of English speech - are essentially a toolkit for “heightening” without falsifying. He bends the current language until it snaps into intensity.

Context matters: Hopkins is writing in the long shadow of Wordsworth’s push toward “the real language of men,” but he refuses Wordsworth’s gentler naturalism. Industrial modernity is rearranging what “current” even means; scientific precision and urban speed are changing English by the decade. Hopkins answers with a poetics that feels like a live wire: faithful to the moment’s idiom, distrustful of stale prettiness, and hungry to make contemporary speech capable of awe.