The GM Hopkins Archive contains more than 150 lectures on Hopkins poetry and Hopkins related topics, all generously donated by Festival participants, to our Archive since our foundation in 1987.
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 ...
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Margaret Ellsberg discusses Hopkins's 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.
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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.
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