The Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive 2004 offers a free resource to students, scholars and enthusiasts for Hopkins and his poety. Lectures contained here include: Gerard Manley Hopkins in Ireland; an assessment of Norman White and his Hopkins Scholarship; Jesuit Influence on the Life and Works of Flannery O'Connor; Kingfishers Catching Fire - Imagery and a Suggestion and more. Lecturers include: Patrick Samway SJ, Brian Arkins, Desmond Egan, Sakiko Sagagi, Peter Milward SJ.
Poor Hopkins! We can't help feeling sympathy for him, caught as he was in the sad predicament he describes for us so poignantly in the 'terrible sonnets' of his Dublin years. Surely there can be no poems in the whole compass of English literature that so painfully portray such agony as he feels in his Irish exile. It may all be seen as coming to a precisely defined climax in the sonnet, 'To seem the stranger'.
Read the rest of Father Milward lecture of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Ireland
This Paper aims to assess the biographies of, and articles on Hopkins, by Dr. Norman White, one of the world's leading authorities on the poet. Until recently, Dr. White was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in Univesity College, Dublin. The major works I question are: Hopkins: A Literary Biography (oxford, 1992); Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales (Bridgend 1998); and (Dublin 2002).
Read the rest of Dr. Arkins review of Norman White biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins here
The next time you are waiting in the departure lounge at the Dublin Airport, I suggest you read the short biographies of famous Irish-Americans featured there. Flannery O'Connor's notes correctly that her parents were of Irish immigrant stock. Yet the writer states with the brash assurance of someone trying to sell a certain bridge linking Brooklyn and Manhattan that O'Connor regularly visited the film director John Huston at his home in County Galway. There is no evidence, alas, that O'Connor ever set foot in the land of her ancestors. She had planned such a trip in 1958, after a short visit to Lourdes and Paris, but her declining health prevented from her from doing so. She indicated in a letter to her friend Ashley Brown that she did not feel well enough to go to Ireland, but she wished others of her group all the best if they wish to disport themselves at the famous "Baloney Castle," as she phrased it ( The Habit of Being 277). Read the rest of this Lecture here
The autograph draft of this sonnet is undated and the poem, untitled. Large colons in front of lines 9, 11, and 12 indicate that their first syllable is stressed; while a large colon between 'grace' and 'that' shows that both words are to be stressed.Norman Mackenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales . . .
Read the rest of Desmond Egan's analysis of When Kingfishers Catch Fire
With many critics, I agree that Hopkins had a concrete image for everything, not only in the sense that he sang of kingfishers, dragonflies, and stones in the poem 'As kingfishers catch fire', but also that he constructed his philosophical and theological thinking through concrete images. In this paper, I approach Hopkins's thought in this poem through his visual construction.
Analysis of As Kingfisher Catch Fire || Theological Look at Hopkins Poetry || Hopkins in Ireland || Norman White Hopkins Biograppher | | Jesuit Influence on Hopkins Poetry ||