ABSTRACT Hopkins's Homer: a Scholarly Edition of Gerard Manley
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ABSTRACT Hopkins’s Homer: A Scholarly Edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Dublin Notes on the Iliad Melinda Creech, Ph.D. Mentor: Joshua King, Ph.D. In a letter to his mother (13 January 1886), Gerard Manley Hopkins mentioned that he was “taking notes for one [a book] on Homer’s art.”(CW II 757). These notes on the Iliad, made while Hopkins was living in Dublin, on sixty-five pages of folded sheets of paper, are housed at Campion Hall, Oxford. In the Campion Hall manuscript, Hopkins makes this final statement: “After this I am going to make my notes mainly on my interleaved book. Feb. 12 ’86.” Those additional fifteen pages, interleaved into his copy of Homeri Ilias (1883), are housed at the Foley Library, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington. Taken together, the two sets of notes, consisting of 514 items and pertaining to fifty- seven pages in his edition of the Iliad, were written between November 1884 and ca. February 1886. A transcription of Hopkins’s notes, those housed at Campion Hall, and those housed at Gonzaga University, and a commentary on those notes comprises the bulk of the dissertation. These Dublin Notes on the Iliad, written by Hopkins during one of the darkest times of his life, when he was estranged from his country, his family, and his beloved Wales, provide a unique insight into the way he regarded the art of Homer’s poetry—the way Homer ordered the words, phrases, and lines that contributed to that poetry; the way that “stock” epithets were not stock at all, but expressed nuanced characteristics of the things and people they modified; the value Homer placed on the inscape of words, fitting each word into its place in the lines of dactylic hexameter—and the way Hopkins reflected his study of Homer in his own poetry, particularly the poetry he wrote and revised while living in Ireland. Hopkins's Homer: A Scholarly Edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins's Dublin Notes on the Iliad by Melinda Creech, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation Approved by the Department of English Kevin Gardner, Ph.D., Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Dissertation Committee Joshua King, Ph.D., Chairperson Hope Johnston, Ph.D. Ralph Wood, Ph.D. Phillip Donnelly, Ph.D. Joe Fulton, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School December 2016 J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2016 by Melinda Creech All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ x DEDICATION ................................................................................................................ xii CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................... 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Preface ........................................................................................................................ 1 Provenance ................................................................................................................ 4 Hopkins’s Background in Greek ............................................................................ 6 Review of Previous Research ............................................................................... 10 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 13 Summary of Chapters and Appendices .............................................................. 14 CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................. 20 A Transcription of and Commentary on Hopkins’s Loose Notes on the Iliad .. 20 Description of Hopkins’s Loose Notes on the Iliad in the Hopkins Collection at Campion Hall, Oxford .............................................................. 20 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 21 Editorial Principles ................................................................................................ 23 v CHAPTER THREE ....................................................................................................... 206 A Transcription of and Commentary on Hopkins’s Interleaved Notes on the Iliad ............................................................................................................ 206 Description of Hopkins’s Interleaved Notes on the Iliad in the Gerard Manley Hopkins Collection at Gonzaga University .................................. 206 The Dates of the Notes ........................................................................................ 208 CHAPTER FOUR ......................................................................................................... 242 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 242 APPENDIX A ................................................................................................................ 255 Hyperbaton: Hopkins’s Syntax Reflected in His Dublin Notes on the Iliad .... 255 Parallelism ............................................................................................................. 271 Re-ordering ........................................................................................................... 286 Omission of Words .............................................................................................. 288 Conciseness ........................................................................................................... 289 Sound ..................................................................................................................... 291 “Justness of Usage” .............................................................................................. 294 APPENDIX B ................................................................................................................ 301 “A Crimson-cresseted East:” Hopkins’s Epithets Reflected in His Dublin Notes on the Iliad ................................................................................................. 301 γλαυκῶπις {with gleaming eyes} ...................................................................... 319 μεγάθυμοι {great-hearted} ................................................................................. 320 vi αἰγιόχοιο {aegis-bearing} .................................................................................... 322 βοὴν ἀγαθός {good at the war cry} .................................................................. 325 ἐϋκνήμιδας {well-greaved} ................................................................................ 327 χαλκοκορυστῇ {bronze-armed, equipped with bronze} ............................... 328 δῖον {goodly, godly} ............................................................................................ 330 φαίδιμος {shining, radiant, glistening} ............................................................. 332 κορυθαίολος {with glancing helm} ................................................................... 333 δολιχόσκιον {casting a long shadow} ............................................................... 334 λευκώλεμος {white-armed} ............................................................................... 336 ἱπποδάμοιο {tamer of horses} ............................................................................ 338 ἑυπέπλῳ {beautifully robed} ............................................................................. 339 ἠϋκόμοιο {lovely haired} .................................................................................... 340 APPENDIX C ................................................................................................................ 343 Epithets in the Iliad on Which Hopkins Commented in the Dublin Notes ..... 343 APPENDIX D ................................................................................................................ 360 Winged Words: Hopkins’s Vocabulary Reflected in His Dublin Notes on the Iliad ............................................................................................................ 360 Shared Vocabulary Related to Domestic Skills ................................................ 381 Shared Vocabulary Related to Thermodynamics ............................................ 386 Shared Vocabulary Related to Nature .............................................................. 395 vii APPENDIX E ................................................................................................................ 411 Text Mining/Analysis of Hopkins’s Dublin Notes on the Iliad and His English Poems ..................................................................................................... 411 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 419 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Hopkins’s loose notes on the Iliad in the Hopkins Collection at Campion Hall, Oxford…………………………………...…………………………25 Figure 3.1. Hopkins’s interleaved notes on the Iliad in the Gerard Manley Hopkins Collection