Gerard Manley Hopkins

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Book Overview

This book collects the complete work of Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the most original and influential poets of the 19th century. Arranged in chronological order, and capturing the full range of his poetic interests at each stage of his life, the poems are complemented by selections from Hopkins' journals, sermons, and letters, which offer prose perspectives on the concerns which surface in the verse. Phillips has gone back to the original...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192813862
• ISBN13: 9780192813862
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 429 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things The supplementary documents and the great poems

For most readers including myself what matters in a poet are the great poems. These are the poems most frequently anthologized andmost widely known. These are the ones some of us read over and over again, and even try to memorize. But along with and behind the great poems are the lesser poems. And along with this is the documentation of a life, which in Hopkins case includes many letters. There is too in a critical edition of the poems another benefit for the reader, for in some cases we can see the variants and the transformations the poems undergo before reaching final form. Again all of these background materials would be nothing without the great poems. In Hopkins poems there is the fresh and wildly original connection with Nature, the miraculous inventiveness of language, a way of seeing and saying like no other poet before. There is too the God - consciousness which pervades Hopkins works and makes him one of the greatest of all the religious poets. This volume enables us to deepen in our knowledge of one of the English language's greatest poets.