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.
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.
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.
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.
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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