Poems and Prose

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Other authorsW. H. Gardner (Editor)

Paperback, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

821

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Classics (1988), Paperback, 304 pages

Description

Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus at the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wishes of my superiors'. The poems, letters and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life, and published posthumously in 1918. His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member gmenchen

One of my favorite book designs from the Folio Society

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LibraryThing member kylekatz

Hopkins is my favorite poet of all time. Especially good if you're depressed. Well, he has some of the most depressed poms I know of. Maybe not good to read when you're too depressed.

LibraryThing member PollyMoore3

You either love him or hate him. I love him, and recall being most indignant when Brigid Brophy included him in “Fifty Works of English Literature we could Do Without”. Who now reads Ms Brophy….? I love both the magical, dazzling, sometimes hard-to-follow words, and the thought behind them:

that I am a jack, joke, poor potsherd, yet an immortal diamond, that each hung bell’s bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name, that I am soft sift, yet steady as water in a well. Hopkins was an early warning on eco-destruction: “the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod”; “O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew – hack and rack the growing green”; “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”. His nature observations are precise and accurate. Priest and celibate he was, but the rhythm of his grimmer sonnets kept running through my head whilst I was in labour: “No worst, there is none”; “Patience, hard thing”. Favourites: “I am soft sift” and “I kiss my hand” (yes, let’s go OTT!) from “Wreck of the Deutschland”; “God’s Grandeur”; “The Starlight Night”; “Spring”; “The Windhover”; “Binsey Poplars”; “Inversnaid”; “As kingfishers Catch Fire”; “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”, and “Ash-boughs”.

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LibraryThing member GRLopez

I have only completed a selection of poetry:

The Windhover
God's Grandeur
Pied Beauty
The Caged Skylark
Carrion Comfort
No worst
The Wreck of the Deutschland

I enjoyed the poet's style and use of stanzas; most poems were short. Many were about his spiritual struggles or emotional conflicts. His poetry was

similar to King David's of the Old Testament who also wrestled with contradictory feuds between personal defeat and victory, despair and encouragement, and anxiety and peace.

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LibraryThing member therebelprince

An absolutely fascinating poet, whose mind I am still attempting to wrap myself around.

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