Topics, Lectures from Hopkins Festival
1987 - 2023
This online Hopkins Archive is a collection of Lectures given each July at the Hopkins Literary Festival since its inception in 1987.
Among topics covered;Sakiko Takagi undertakes A theological reading, 'As kingfishers Catch Fire .. ; Desmond Egan looks at imagery in As Kingfishers ... ; Kevin MacEneaney considers
Absence and Presence in the Poetry of Baudelaire, Hopkins and Egan and more.
We appreciate the generosity of our visitors who allow us to include their Lectures.
Irish Stone Sculptor, James McKenna was commissioned by the GM Hopkins Society to create this fine monument to the poet in 1991, Monasterevin. James was an enthusiastic supporter, contributor, the the Hopkins Literary Festival until his untimely death in 2000.
James McKenna The ‘Famine Family’ stands in the grounds of Athy Hospital, South Kildare.
Commissioned by Kildare County Council, the sculpture was carved from 4,000-year-old black oak and stands 8 feet tall.
James Mc Kenna (1993-2000) enjoys a huge reputation among his contemporaries. Alice Hanratty said of him that he was ’the finest sculptor of the last hundred – and maybe the last thousand years’ while artist Michael Kane said that he was ‘one of the five or six finest artists in the world’.
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 here
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 mart
Read more Victorian Poet, gerard Manley Hopkins was buried in Glasnevein Cemetary, Dubln.
Silence in Hopkins's Poetry Giuseppe Serpillo
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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Lectures delivered at Hopkins Literary Festival 2022
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 ...
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.Read more
Hopkins's Abiding Fascination with Death: Eamon Kiernan
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 DeathRead more
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
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.
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.
Read more
