Catherine Phillips,
Cambridge University,
Editor:
Hopkins Letters,
This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival 2014
On Sept 10 1864 the twenty-year old Gerard Manley Hopkins received a letter from his Oxford friend, A. W. Mowbray Baillie: ‘Dear Baillie, - Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead [the Hopkins family’s home]. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at once on an answer… The letter-writer on principle does not make his letter only an answer; it is a work embodying perhaps answers to questions put by his correspondent but that is not its main motive. ... Hopkins Correspondence with Newman Catherine Philips
Hopkins’ Hidden God: Inscape, Pascal and the Aesthetic Wager
This lecture was delivered during the Hopkins Literary Festival 2014
Robert Smart,
Quinnipiac University
USA.
In order to keep this exploratory excursus within the presentation time limits, this paper will be a kind of thoughtful ramble, not unlike Hopkins’ meanderings through the Kildare countryside. I have in mind to triangulate three large areas of understanding: Hopkins’ ... Read Robert Smart lecture on Hopkins's Hidden God here
Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Egan: Absence and Presence
Kevin T. McEneaney, Poet
New York.
This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival July 2014
Algernon Swinburne had exalted Victor Hugo as semi-divine poet in his Fortnightly Review of L’Année terrible (1872). Praising Hugo’s domestic poems rather than his political poems, Swinburne created a trend for domestic poems in Victorian England. Hugo had been writing domestic poems since at least 1842, for example, “My Two Daughters,” where his daughters are depicted with white carnations trembling in the breeze like butterflies ...
Thomas McCarthy, OP
Newbridge College,
County Kildare,
This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival July 2014
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks.
IT WAS A HARD THING—GMH The Major Works, Oxford’s World Classics, 2002,
Oxford, 29].
This work is from now on called [‘Oxford’.]
When Jesus saw two men following him, he turned
and asked, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said,
‘Rabbi, where do you live?’ His answer was: ‘Come
and see’ [cf Jn 1:37-39]. Straightforward.
They were anxious to know something... I am not sure they
really wanted to know where Jesus lived, but when you are
caught off-guard while 'looking'/seeking to learn without being
noticed, some answer will come out of your mouth. Perhaps
they did not know what they were looking for, but there was a
certain interest being shown in Jesus and in what was
happening near Jesus. For one thing, that 'wanting to know'
was a kind of desire...
When I first tried to read The Wreck of the Deutschland, I was an unemployed former student drifting among the London Irish. I was in Battersea Public Library. At the desk next to mine sat a mentally-ill woman who was drawing circles on sheets of paper with a pencil. The Wreck seemed very strange, and I did not understand it. But it evoked a mood in me: one of tense, fearful darkness, drumming towards the light. And it seemed to fit the sheets of paper filling up with little circles beside me. If there be a natural readership for this poem, I think it might be such as that troubled woman.
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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