Product Description
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) has long been admired as a letterwriter for the vividness, sense of humor, and honesty with which he expressed his opinions.Although he died young, his life overlapped with some of the great poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Robert Bridges--of the Victorian era, and his comments on them are astute and revealing.This collection, drawn from the three volumes edited by C.C. Abbott, covers the whole period of Hopkins's life, adding some important and lesser-known letters that have only recently come to light.Ranging in date from his school days to his final years in Dublin, the letters include correspondence with his German master at Highgate, a rare letter written during the course of his priestly duties, one to an Irish colleague on the political situation in Ireland, a late letter to his brother Everard on art and poetry, and various other letters to his Oxford friends, to John Henry Newman and Coventry Patmore, and to his family.Together they reveal a man of great warmth who had a wonderful perception of natural beauty, and deep religious ardor. ... Read more

Product Description
Excellent sampling of works by one of the Victorian era’s most individual poets includes—among other strikingly original poems—The Wreck of the Deutschland, "Carrion Comfort," "The Caged Skylark," "The Silver Jubilee," as well as a selection of unfinished poems and poem fragments.
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Customer Reviews (5)

Thou are indeed just , Lord
I do not know whether this volume contains the whole of Hopkins' poetry, but it does contain a number of his immortal poems. 'Felix Randal, the Farrier'The world is filled with the Grandeur of God, 'Pied Beauty'.
Hopkins is in my feeling one of the greatest of English poets. His verse has an intensity, a freshness in which he sees into the deepest heart of things. It has a portrayal of mood and feeling, especially despair which is deep and unique. His language is his own and his rhythm a remarkable invention and return to primal Anglo-Saxon sprung verse. Some of his lines go with me all the time, inspire and fill me with a sense of how Beauty in Words lifts the Soul.
I myself love two poems of his above all, the one which begins with 'Thou art Indeed Just Lord' and which ends with 'Birds build, but not I build, but strain , Time's Eunuch, and never breed one work that wakes, Thou, O my Lord of Life, Send my Roots Rain. "And the second I most love is the title poem of this collection, " The world is charged with the Grandeur of God/
It will flame out like shining from shook foil/.
There are other more richly annotated editions of his poems which are also recommended.

Excellent Catholic Poetry
The poetry of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins is some of the greatest modern Catholic poetry ever produced by an Englishman.Received into the Catholic Church by J.H. Newman and later ordained a Jesuit priest, Fr. Hopkins never made a name for himself while alive.After his death, a friend of his discovered his poetry, compiled it into a short volume, and published it.It immediately became a hit amongst the English, and eventually spread throughout the entire Catholic world.

Hopkins uses a variety of verse (from sprung to your run-of-the-mill iambic pentameter), which makes for an exciting read.Some of his poems, such as GOD'S GRANDEUR and PIED BEAUTY have even made it into a poetry appendix in the American translation of the Catholic breviary.These poems are wonderful starters for meditation, and they capture the thoughts of a man's heart as it aspires towards God.A wonderful read.

Not poetry for the uninitiated....
This is a good, inexpensive introduction to Gerard Manley Hopkins.There is a brief section talking about Hopkins and how much of his poetry was lost.This gives you an idea of who is giving you this poetry.

For the poetry student, the Author's Preface is essential.Here, Sprung Rhythm is explained.If you are not a serious student of poetry, this will probably be lost on you.It is not necessary to read the poetry, but to understand Hopkins' style, it is a must-read.

The poetry itself is filled with religious and classical images and allusions.If you are not well-read, like me, you may not get every thing that Hopkins is explaining to you.There are some notes in the back, but these are limited.I have no doubt that Hopkins is intelligent, but I will need to do some extra reading to fully understand all of this.

I think this is a great read.It is not a quick read by any means.This is poetry which is read again and again to get a full understanding.I would also recommend reading this aloud.

God's Grandeur... Hopkins shows it well.
Hopkins is one of those poets hidden from so many because of his subject matter, yet is considered one of the most influential Victorian poets for his use of word combinations, meter and image.

Most his work was published posthumously, as late as 1920 or so, and immediately influenced the likes of T.S. Elliot (AKA, the guy who wrote the poem "Cats" is based on and "Wasteland") and his contemporaries.

While Whitman and Wilde were exalting in themselves, and just after Emerson and Thoreau were helping us see creation, Hopkins demonstrated prowess in pointing readers to see the Creator in the creation.

Atheists won't agree with him, of course, but he says it so well, they will at least go, "Hmm... if I believed, I could see that... yeah, wow, well put." The Catholics will cheer him on, "Atta boy... yep, that guy's a Jesuit!" Not undone are the Protestants who will be so impressed in agreement they'll be happy he was a Christian.

Check out this snippet from "Pied Beauty" "Glory be to God for dappled things--/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;/Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;/And 'all tra'des, their gear and tackle and trim." Those accents are in the original.

Delicious to say aloud? You should hear the second verse. His others are as tasty.

This edition is something you want to pop in with a larger Amazon order... buy it on whimsy if you aren't sure. It is an inexpensive as book can get this side of free.

I fully recommend this book.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

Hit me with some more of the sprung rhythm baby!
On those days when getting out of bed is a psychological problem, I take one cup of earl grey with milk and a shot of Gerard Manley Hopkins.Something about the way he puts his words together makes me walk out of thehouse seeing in a totally diferent way.Hopkins struggles with what it isto be faithful, with what it is to live in creation in a way which honorsGod, with what, finally, it is to be human.I'm particularly fond of thisvolume, just because it contains all my favorite of his poems.I've trieda couple of other collections of his work, but I find that I just flipthrough them until I come to the stuff that I like from this one, so what'sthe point.Carrion Comfort, The Windhover, and God's Grandeur areincredible pieces of work.I've read them, literally, hundreds of timesand they have not lost their ability to challenge me.That, in myexperience, is a rare thing; something that helps me get out of bed in themorning. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Love Suffers
In these two short novels, Francois Mauriac further explores the central theme of his life work: the mystery of love revealed through suffering. Mauriac, who won the 1952 Nobel Prize for literature, was a comitted Catholic whose faith nonetheless refused sentimentalism or happy endings.
In "The Enemy," we meet an ugly man who through his family's wealth (and his own ill-advised reading of a chapter of Nietzsche) marries a beautiful woman who despises him. "The Weakling" likewise is a protagonist whose physical attributes help create for him a world of terrible suffering at the hands of others. Grace--that most mysterious of Christian experiences--comes through each character to those around them. Those "normal" folk who more resemble the majority of us...
I cannot recommend these works, or any of Mauriac's works, highly enough. He is one of France's great undiscovered treasures, who (though he inspired and was the friend of such figures as Elie Weisel and Graham Green) has been all but forgotten. One needn't embrace his Catholicism to sense the profound truth of the Christian faith he espoused, nor the beautiful way in which he espoused it. Sadly beautiful... ... Read more

Product Description
A selection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This book is part of a series aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist, and as such carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. Other poets featured in this series include Christina Rossetti, John Keats and W.B. Yeats. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting critical anthology
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover (John Pick, editor) (Merrill, 1968)

Pick collects what he considers the best of the various schools of scholarship on Hopkins' most-written-about sonnet and presents it in textbook fashion, complete with ideas for possible papers at the end of the book. While, obviously, such a tome is going to get a tad dry after a while, this ends up being a fascinating account of how a couple of well-placed double-entendres in a poem can spark firestorms of criticism among different schools of thought. Of particular interest is a series of letters published in a London newspaper in the mid-fifties in which three critics snipe at one another's interpretations of the poem. It's beautiful stuff. One wonders if literary critics are ever so on fire about anything else.

In the end, the book does what it's supposed to do; it acquaints its readers with the differing schools of thought on Hopkins' poem, and in doing so may illuminate the reader to ideas within the poem he had not previously seen. A good resource for Hopkins scholars. *** ... Read more

Product Description
The Victorian Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins found in religious discipline, and released in his poetry, the tremendous power at the heart of the human language.The two coinciding, and often conflicting, vocations of poetry and priesthood resulted in a tension explicitly documented in the verse.The spiritual struggle that began with the first line Hopkins wrote as a priest--"Thou mastering me/God!"-- culminates with the so-called "terrible sonnets," which represent a strange triumph over scruple and a bending of his domineering will.This study traces the connections between the poet's development of the concept of vocation, his grasp of the implications of sacrament, his interpretation of the function of particulars in nature, and, in an ironic balance of decorum and irregularity, his subtle appropriation of something resembling baroque aesthetics.Margaret Ellsberg's incisive analysis clearly illustrates the ways in which Hopkins called upon the vocabularies of his dual vocation to achieve a voice perfectly pitched at praise. ... Read more

Product Description
The author looks at the lives and work of Arthur Hugh Clough and Gerard Manley Hopkins considered by him to be the two most significant religious poets writing in English in the 19th century. He approaches his subjects from a new angle, namely, that of the philosopher rather than the literary critic and aims to cast fresh and revealing light on these two Victorian poets (both of whom trained in philosophical thought and poetical creation). Their lives challenge comparison: initially parallel, they yet diverge in opposite directions. Both came from middle class Anglican families: both were educated in the same disciplines in the same institution - Balliol College, Oxford. Though Clough was the elder by a generation, they shared a number of common friends and were influenced by several of the same people. During their time in Oxford they both underwent a religious development, but in opposite senses: Clough moved from Anglicanism towards Unitarianism and eventually agnosticism, while Hopkins moved from Anglicanism to Catholicism and found his abiding vocation as a Jesuit. The author questions how such different conclusions can be reached from such co mmon premises.Dr Kenny has written an autobiography called "A Path from Rome". ... Read more

Product Description
This study focuses upon Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems that are either addressed totally and directly to God or the Blessed Virgin Mary; poems that are prayers in part; and poems that are meditations on a religious theme. It categorizes the poems by the topics most influential in shaping Hopkins' spiritual and poetic life, and chronicles the progress of Hopkins' spiritual life and his efforts to minimize himself as a poet and render praise and honour to God. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book is a medley of scholarship and spiritual reading.
In this text, the author attempts to read Hopkins' poems as prayers, the fruit of his relationship with God.His hope is that the reader will understand Hopkins' spirituality as well as his poetic sensibility.Whenread with the poems, the text also serves as personal spiritual reading. ... Read more