In 2015, Japan Representative of Hopkins Society of Japan, Kansai from Nanzan University Nagoya, give us a most informative presentation of Hopkins in Japan
Plenary Lecture Hopkins International Festival, 2015
James P Mackey
Professor Emeritus
Edimburgh University, Scotland.
The most substantial resource for the history of the prophet from Nazareth is provided in what is called the New Testament section of the Bible, in what must be recognised as a collection, made and re-made in the early years, of the oral memoirs and cherished writings of different groups of Christ followers, until by an equally long sequence of acceptance and culling, a selection of the best attested sections was authorised and called the New Testament.
Jane Chilcott sees Gerard Manley Hopkins’s need to fall in love, to connect, with a landscape or wild creature as a means of displacing other desires, his struggles with his faith and with unspecified, but easily guessed at, temptations of the flesh and spirit.
September, 1917, Robert Bridges wrote to Mrs. Manley Hopkins, Gerard Hopkins’ mother: “I have had lately some very authoritative appeals for the publication of all Gerard’s poetical remains. He goes on to relate how that very afternoon he had met a man just arrived from Petrograd Adamson examines this question in a follow-up to an earlier lecture on Hopkins and Bridges.
William Adamson continues to tease the complex relationship between Hopkins and Bridges.
To mark the publication of his French translation of Hopkins Sermons, award winning translator, Bruno Gaurier, introduced Hopkins, Poet, Priest and Preacher.
Explore Hopkins Poet, Priest and Preacher here
In the UK Hopkins Society we sometimes ask readers of our Journal to tell us their favourite Hopkins poem. But what was Hopkins’ own favourite? Not the one he thought was the best (that was The Windhover), but the one he liked best, and cared most about. I venture to suggest it was one that very few people have even heard of – his unfinished play St Winefred’s Well (StWW).
Explore Lance Pierson's exploration of St Winifred's Well here
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
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