The Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive
1987 - 2024
Over 150 Lectures on hopkins, his poetry and related topics are a free ressource colleccted year, thanks to our visitors, Hopkins scholars over the years. We appreciate all who have contributed their lectures to this Archive.
Lectures are arranged in alphaabetical order under main headings: topics, lecturers and most viewed lectures.
Lectures Hopkins Literary Festival July 2023
- Vision and perception in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The peacock’s eye’ : Katarzyna Stefanowicz
- Hopkins Trees and Birds
- Joyce, Newman and Hopkins : Desmond Egan
- Hopkins and Death: Eamon Kiernan
- Silence in Hopkins's Poetry: Giuseppe Serpillo
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s diary entries from his early Oxford years are a medley of poems, fragments of poems or prose texts but also sketches of natural phenomena or architectural (mostly gothic) features. In a letter to Alexander Baillie written around the time of composition He was planning to follow in the footsteps of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who had been known for writing poetry alongside painting pictures ... Read more
Today I want to talk about Hopkins and his connection with trees and birds, and how in everything he wrote, he associates wild things with a state of rejuvenation. In a letter to Robert Bridges in 1881 about his poem “Inversnaid,” he says “there’s something, if I could only seize it, on the decline of wild nature.” It turns out that Hopkins himself--eye-witness accounts to the contrary notwithstanding-was rather wild. Read more
Joyce's friend, Jacques Mercanton has recorded that he regarded Newman as ‘the greatest of English prose writers
’. Mercanton adds that Joyce spoke excitedly about an article that had just appeared in The Irish Times and had
to do with the University of Dublin, “sanctified’ by Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and
himself
Read more ...
An abiding fascination with death can be identified in the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Easily taken for a sign of pathological morbidity, the poet's interest in death can also be read more positively as indicating, his strong awareness of a fundamental human challenge and his deployment of his intellectual and artistic gifts to try to meet it.
Hopkins's understanding of death is apocalyptic. ... As will be shown, apocalyptic thought reaches
beyond temporal finality. Hopkins's apocalyptic view of death shows itself with perhaps the
greatest consequence in those few works which make the actual event of
death a primary concern and which, moreover, leave in place the ordinariness of dying,
as opposed to portrayals of the exceptional deaths of saints and martyrs.
Hopkins and Death
Silence is like the sea in T.S. Eliot’s “Dry Salvages”: it has many voices, and it can be found both inside and outside us; it can cause suffering and joy; it can be used and misused: it is in your mind and in your heart; it can be chosen or just endured. And it is an important feature of language.
I will consider three types of silence in Hopkins’ poetry: The silence of God; the silent presence of God and the silence embedded in the language code ...
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