More lectures will be added in the next few weeks.
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. ...
Gerard Manley Hopkins Correspondence with John Henry Newman Catherine Philips
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 here
Gerard Manley Hopkins is mostly and at most known around the world as a poet. I personally came to him – or preferably was met by him – through his poetry. As you know he has been part of my poetic and spiritual life since about 20 years as translator of both his poetry and the first part of journals.
There has been until now some discussion and argument about the link – or the non-linkage at all – between his poetry and his personal commitments, above all his becoming a Catholic and assuming priesthood by the Jesuits. ... Gerard Manley Hopkins - the sermons
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 ... Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Egan
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... Desiderata
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. Re-reading the Wreck
Gerard Manley Hopkins Correspondence || Hopkins sermons || Re-reading the Wreck of the Deutchland
Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins| Baudelaire, Hopkins and Egan | Desiderata | Hopkins Sermons : Bruno Gaurier | Re-Reading The Wreck |