Gerard Manley Hopkins Selected Poems Literature Insights

A detailed commentary on the poetry of Hopkins, exploring the significance of contemporary cultural issues and the poet's life as Catholic convert and Jesuit priest. It traces Hopkins's life from his early schooldays, his undergraduate years at Oxford and.

the book offers a detailed commentary on the poetry of Hopkins, exploring the significance of contemporary cultural issues and the poet's life as Catholic convert and Jesuit priest. Part 1 traces Hopkins's life from his early schooldays, his undergraduate years at Oxford and conversion to Catholicism, to his work as a Jesuit scholar and poet-priest. Part 2, explains the core principles of Hopkins's innovative and challenging poetry, including sections on inscape, instress and sprung rhythm. Part 3, provides a detailed critical commentary on most of the major poems, including The Wreck of the Deutschland, God's Grandeur, The Windhover, Pied Beauty, The Caged Skylark, Hurrahing in Harvest, Felix Randal, Spring and Fall, Inversnaid, the six 'Terrible Sonnets', and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire. Part 4, explores the history of Hopkins criticism from that of his own contemporaries to twentieth century and current critical approaches. John Gilroy is also the author of Reading Philip Larkin: Selected Poms

Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins created verse that combined material sensuousness with asceticism. This anthology features all of his mature work, including the well-known elegy, "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

Reproduction of the original: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Bridges

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) has long been admired as a letterwriter for the vividness, sense of humor, and honesty with which he expressed his opinions. Although he died young, his life overlapped with some of the great poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Robert Bridges--of the Victorian era, and his comments on them are astute and revealing. This collection, drawn from the three volumes edited by C.C. Abbott, covers the whole period of Hopkins's life, adding some important and lesser-known letters that have only recently come to light. Ranging in date from his school days to his final years in Dublin, the letters include correspondence with his German master at Highgate, a rare letter written during the course of his priestly duties, one to an Irish colleague on the political situation in Ireland, a late letter to his brother Everard on art and poetry, and various other letters to his Oxford friends, to John Henry Newman and Coventry Patmore, and to his family. Together they reveal a man of great warmth who had a wonderful perception of natural beauty, and deep religious ardor.