God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetic sensibility included influence from two major literary traditions: Romanticism and the Victorians. While Hopkins wrote during the Victorian period and is widely considered one of the greatest poets to emerge out of this era, his work was largely influenced by the tradition of Romanticism, which favored poems about nature. However, writing almost a century later, Hopkins took a different approach to his craft. “God’s Grandeur,” like most of his sonnets, evokes the emotional tenor of Romanticism’s nature poems, though his technique differed from the Romantics, particularly in his use of the Victorian practice of word-painting, an aesthetic which favored pictorial imagery and painterly expressions.

As a nature poem, “God’s Grandeur” can be situated in the vernacular of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, portraying the natural world as a place of beauty. Hopkins even lived in and wrote about many of the places where Keats and Wordsworth had visited and written poems about. For instance, Hopkins lived for a brief time in Hampstead, near the garden where Keats wrote his famous “Ode to a Nightingale.” And when he was studying to become a Jesuit priest, he lived in Wales, where Wordsworth, widely considered to be the founder of Romanticism, had traveled in his youth and about which he wrote his seminal “Tintern Abbey” poem.