Anthropocentrism and the Soul of Hopkins’s Ecopoetics

According to this view, the individual’s relation to the collective is secondary to the soul’s relation to God, ethical behavior being primarily a matter of individual free will supported by conscience and the cultivation of persistent self-reflection. By encouraging souls in such fervor, poetry marshals aesthetics to educate its readership in a renewed reverence and responsiveness toward the natural world as the locus of divine immanence and diverse being. [...]private meditation on the condition of the individual soul and its ethical development, exemplified in the Spiritual Exercises, may be expanded into a public discourse directed at spiritually refreshing and invigorating the commonwealth of British souls. Because poetry stimulates thought, it challenges “the highest powers of man’s mind,” its structure forcing us to “appreciate each syllable” and “to dwell on all modifications” (Ox. [...]correlatively, quite aside from the aesthetic and utilitarian value of nonhuman nature, it has a dangerously under-recognized ethical value: namely, that it fosters long-standing, unexpected networks of being, without which being of all varieties is impoverished.