“Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet”: Critical Plant Studies and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Plant Poetics

Regardless of their scientifically established vitality and agency, plants are still typically visualized as dormant elements of nature and allocated minimal importance. In literature, equivalently, plants are treated as insensate, unresponsive background elements and ornamental devices, which are perennially overlooked. It is due to the inception of critical plant studies that plants are brought into public attention as vitally awake, cognizant individuals playing active roles in the composition of the universe as well as literature. As a response to cultural and literary neglect of plants in human life, critical plants studies underpins the mattering of plants and embarks on investigating human-plant relationships from an interdisciplinary perspective. To this end, biological and botanical understanding of plants is appropriated into the literary representation of plants with the intention of superseding the metaphoric existence of plants in literature with that of biological standing. This study, accordingly, deals with the plant poetry of a prominent Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) whose poetry allows an insightful access to the astoundingly complicated and animated world of plants and in this way, attempts to build a non-dualistic and non-oppressive human-plant relationship through his poetry. Thus, “Asboughs”, “Spring”, “Binsey Poplars”, and “Inversnaid” are specifically chosen poems presenting a perfect case study to demonstrate Hopkins’ attentiveness towards plants. The study will further uncover Hopkins’ botanical consciousness and environmental awareness propelling him to condemn humans’ brutal exploitation of plants which predominantly stems from an anthropocentric view of plants as lifeless commercial objects that can be used and consumed.