Gerard Manley Hopkins

Renowned Hopkins expert Joseph J. Feeney, SJ, offers a fresh take on Gerard Manley Hopkins which shakes our understanding of his poetry and his life and points towards the next phase in Hopkins studies. While affirming the received view of Hopkins as a major poet of nature, religion, and psychology, Feeney finds a pervasive, rarely noticed playfulness by employing both the theory of play and close reading of his texts. This new Hopkins lived a playful life from childhood till death as a student who loved puns and jokes and wrote parodies, comic verse, and satires; as a Jesuit who played and organized games and had "a gift for mimicry;" and most significantly, as a poet and prose stylist who rewards readers with unexpected displays of whimsy and incongruity, even, strikingly, in "The Wreck of the Deutschland," "The Windhover," and the "Terrible Sonnets." Feeney convincingly argues that Hopkins's distinctive playfulness is inextricably bound to his sense of fun, his creativity, his style, and his competitiveness with other poets. In unexpected images, quirky metaphors, strange perspectives, puns, coinages, twisted syntax, wordmusic, and sprung rhythm, we see his playful streak burst forth to adorn those works critics consider his most brilliant. No one who absorbs this book's radical readings will ever see and hear Hopkins's poetry and prose quite the way they used to.

In his poetry Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 89) sought to discover afresh the potentialities of language, and to that end developed his idiosyncratic theories of instress, inscape and sprung rhythm. Hopkins's verse is also informed by his religious beliefs; having converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, he became a Jesuit priest eleven years later. However, his poetry is free from a sense of religious dogma, and instead offers a whole hearted involvement with all aspects of life, a love of nature and a search for a unifying sacramental view of creation. His best known poems include 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', 'The Windhover', 'Pied Beauty', 'Spring and Fall', 'Carrion Comfort' and 'Harry Ploughman'.

Discover How Hopkins’s Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own. "Poetry and art and music seize upon the human experience in ways that reveal new possibilities of intimacy with the Divine. In the way they reach out and grab us by the heart at unexpected times, they reaffirm that the Holy will meet us when it chooses ..." —from the Preface by Rev. Thomas Ryan, CSP Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christian mystical poet, is beloved for his use of fresh language and startling metaphors to describe the world around him. Beneath the surface of this lovely verse lies a searching soul, wrestling with and yearning for God. Hopkins writes from a Christian background, and yet his themes speak to people of all faiths who seek a deeper understanding of the presence of God in all of life. This beautiful sampling of Hopkins’s poetry offers a glimpse into his unique spiritual vision that continues to inspire readers throughout the world. The poems unite his two devotions, presenting mystical images of Christ in the natural world, which serve as a window through which you might also begin to see the Divine Presence in the world around you.

Collection of poems by Hopkins, nearly all first published after his death, by UK poet laureate Robert Bridges, whom no one today has heard of -- go figure.

'O let them be left, wildness and wet' As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' incomparably brilliant poetry, ranging from the ecstasy of 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty' to the heart-wrenching despair of the 'sonnets of desolation'. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Hopkins' Poems and Prose is available in Penguin Classics.

'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter... [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

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."