Zen Buddhistic Approach to G. M. Hopkin's Poetry

Cheong, Seok-Kweon. “Zen Buddhistic Approach to G. M. Hopkins’s Poetry.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 33.4(2007): 113-127. The aim of this paper is to read some poems of G. M. Hopkins in the context of Zen Buddhism. Though it seems somewhat irrelevant to study Hopkins’s “Christian” poems in relation to Zen Buddhism, this approach could appreciate Hopkins’s poems in a new perspective, and also could bridge the gap between the Eastern and Western ideas. The enlightened Zen mind transcends cause and effect, connects past and present, and does not distinguish between ordinary and holy. Hopkins showed through his poems revolt against such mutually exclusive dualism as the world of becoming and the world of Being, spirit and matter, and so on. Thus Zen Buddhistic approach to Hopkins’s poetry reveals that through his revolt against dualism and the quest toward the vision of wholeness, Hopkins tried to liberate man’s consciousness from the spiritual dungeon of Cartesian dualism typical of the Western thought. (Chonbuk National University)