Index Hopkins LiteraryFestival Lectures 2016

Hopkins’s Friends in Dublin Friends

Let us begin with something new, a quotation dated 11 June 1889, from a diary: I had a very busy day as in the morning I had to assist at the office for poor Fr Hopkins, SJ. But a few weeks ago he and I were walking together: this time I have escaped.

This diary was kept by Fr. Richard Colohan who had taught classics at Clonliffe College. In 1888 he was serving as a curate in St Kevin’s parish based in No 83 Stephens Green and ministering in Newman’s University Church on the Green. The historian Brendan O Cathaoir drew my attention to this diary. He discovered it while editing a history of Bray parish where Fr. Colohan later served as parish priest. Brendan also noted that Hopkins enjoyed visiting Fr Colahan’s mother and sister in Dalkey, Co. Dublin.

Read historian Michael McGinley on Hopkins's Dublin Friends

Hopkins and his Mexican Translators

In the sonnet Let me be to Thee as a circling bird..., Hopkins musically states the nature of a new found kind of communication with his God:

I have found my music in a common word,
Trying each pleasurable throat that sings
And every praised sequence of sweet strings,
And now infallibly which I preferred.

Mario Murgia on Hopkins Mexican Translators

Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023

• Vision and perception in GM Hopkins’s ‘The peacock’s eye’ Katarzyna Stefanowicz

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

• Morning's Minion:Hopkins,Trees and Birds Margaret Ellsberg

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, Newman and Hopkins : Desmond Egan

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 ...

• Hopkins and 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. Read more

More 2023 Lectures to follow

Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2022

Lectures delivered at the GM Hopkins Literary Festival since 1987

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