hopkins head

Lectures from Hopkins Festival July 2022

Brett C. Millier
Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature
Department of English
Middlebury College, USA.

Emily Dickinson, Hopkins and the Wrestle with God

Lectures from The Hopkins Festival July 2022

Both Dickinson and Hopkins used their poetry to express, comment upon their personal spiritual and religious journeys in ways that speak to nearly universal questions of the spirit. Comparing Dickinson and Hopkins is on one level, fairly obvious. Both are mid-to-late nineteenth century white and well-educated writers, relatively privileged. Both were also essentially self-taught poets who transformed the sound and texture of English verse through their experimentation with meter, rhythm, diction, syntax, and punctuation.

Read more on Dickenson and Hopkins


Walt Whitman and his Influence on Hopkins' Poetry

Desmond Egan Poet,
Artistic Director,  The GM Hopkins Festival
Newbridge

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than  any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant  confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the  more determined that I will not. So writes Hopkins in a letter to Bridges.  

Was the american Poet, Walt Whitman, a major Influence on Hopkins's Poetry? Read more ...


Landscapes: Hopkins and Egan Poetry Reviewed

Giuseppe Serpillo
University of Sassari, 
Sardinia

Why compare two poets living two centuries apart, coming from different countries and cultural backgrounds? Hopkins spent the last five years of his life in Ireland and knew these surroundings quite well; he enjoyed the landscape of this country as much as he had loved that of England and Wales. Inspired by this fact, Desmond Egan created this international festival, being himself a passionate close reader and an expert of Hopkins. I thought that their view of the landscape could be  a useful starting point to better  appreciate the respective development of their poetry, and perhaps acquire some new insight into their poetics. 

Landscape in Hopkins and Egan Poetry


Dualism in Hopkins's Poetry


Father Brendan Staunton S.J.
The Pro-Cathedral,
Dublin 1.
This article is based on a Lecture given at the 34th Hopkins Festival September 2021

As a young Jesuit in formation, we were told that it's not what you do, but who you are that counts. So the stress on interiority, an inner life was primary, and action was secondary. This scholastic definition was corrected, on reading this sonnet by Hopkins: what I do is me! A dualism dissolved.

Hopkins - dualism dissolved


Hopkins and Bridges Friendship


This Lecture was delivered by William Adamson at the Hopkins Literary Festival July 2022
William Adamson,
University of Ulm,
Germany

Gerard Hopkins and Robert Bridges might be considered an odd couple, physically1 very unalike and divided by many psychological and religious differences, and not least by their approach to and understanding of poetry. But despite this, the friendship that began at Oxford University in 1863 was to last twenty-six years, right up until Hopkins’ death in 1889.

Explore this odd friendship with Adamson



Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023