Date of Award

Fall 9-9-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in Education

Department

College of Education, Doctoral Program

First Advisor

Gonzalo Obelleiro

Abstract

It has been 107 years since the first collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ were published by the poet-scholar’s friend and confidant Robert Seymour Bridges. Literary commentators, historians, and theologians have sought to understand the great poet of the Jesuits since the posthumous release of the poetry to the wide world in 1918. Of the many angles on Hopkins’s life that have been analyzed and examined, we could name a few: his sublimated sexuality, his identity as a religious priest, the poet’s placement within The Victorian Period, a voice of apologetic theology within Modernity, a political eco-centric voice, and relationship to the fields of literature, philosophy, and theology. Yet, no one has sought to examine the doing of Hopkins life - his ministry and teaching - to discover that the poet had a significant impact as a poet on articulating the process of ascent and discerning what it means to become a ‘minister of beauty’. Hopkins had more of an impact on the language of ascent than we know, and his effect on education is latent and unexplored. Investigation into the poet calls for an appropriation process to match the poet's works and life with educational theorizing, which involves lifting the tradition of meaning making around the poet’s life and works in the text that follows. Special attention is given to the linkage between philosopher Charles Taylor, Hopkins and future directions in education in the dissertation.

Through the handing on of his poetry and his correspondences to his close friends, Hopkins reaches out his life of poetic isolation and hiding, and the wrecked state of modernity and into the experience of the reader in 2025. Hopkins continues to show, to guide the reader into the window — the heart of The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. His poetry serves as a series of spiritual movements to show the reader a path to the mystical, a road to union with nature’s enduring and broken reality. In the poetic process of Hopkins, the reader is invited to undergo a transformation where the knower fuses with the known, a philosophical process binding the human to nature. The reader conjoins with nature, and a reconciliation and potentially a freedom is brought about through the lines of the poetry. In chapters that follow, Hopkins as a poet is repositioned to be a voice for the field of education, giving way to an undiscovered pathway in Hopkins scholarship. The unpaved road involves developing a philosophy of education from the pedagogical witness, writings and work of Hopkins, and a gateway to a new company of poets. In the final chapter, practical implications are offered for the designers of future schooling and curriculums, yet the enduring call is to the curation and proliferation of Sacramental poets.

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