Chapter 25 - Rhythm

Summary

This chapter argues that we must understand Hopkins’s engagement with rhythm amid the cultural contexts of poetic experimentation and metrical and linguistic inquiry during the nineteenth century, a prosodic discourse in which Hopkins was a participant. Amid linguistic and religious definitions of tradition and rupture, Hopkins thought through several changing definitions of rhythm in language, in poetry and in the world. Our focus on sprung rhythm, though his most well-known innovation, clouds other theories of rhythms and important cultural histories of accent, speech, national identity, and religious identification that show the ways that accent and stress are part of a broader pattern – a broader rhythm he wants to detect – of likeness and difference in all things.