Gerard Manley Hopkins

International Summer School

July 2007

Index of lectures given at the 20th Hopkins Summer School in Monasterevin. Each title is followed by a brief introduction. To read the full Lecture, please follow links.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Henry Newman

Ian Ker, Oxford University
This lecture was delivered at the 20th Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School,
Monasterevin, July 2007 copyright © The Gerard Manley Hopkins Society.

While Newman was on holiday in Switzerland during August and early September 1866, the young undergraduate Hopkins wrote hesitantly to him at the Birmingham Oratory on August 28, asking if he might intrude on the great man, rightly assuming that he was very busy and that he was ‘much exposed to applications from all sides'. (1) What Hopkins did not know was that less than a month before while visiting Glion Newman had at last realized where he must begin the argument of what was to become his philosophical magnum opus, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).

Read the full text of the Ian Ker's lecture, Hopkins and Newman, here

‘Where Springs not fail' Church in the juvenile poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dr hab. Aleksandra Kedzierska, Instytut Anglistyki, UMCS, Lublin, Poland

Although much – and from different angles – has been written about G.M. Hopkins's priesthood, far too little attention has been paid to the depiction of the Church he strove to build also in his poems. Despite the many building blocks he left for the critics to work with, he still has no church he could truly belong to, and failed thus even by his poetic heaven-haven, he is still exposed to the fate of the ‘fortune's football'. Hence, in an attempt to make up for this rather disrespectful gap in Hopkins's scholarship, and, simultaneously, to put an end to the paradoxical homelessness of the priest poet, this essay will concern itself with reconstructing, from the textual evidence available, the image of the church he evoked in his poems. As, however, the is a very complex topic, it is my intention to focus on the least known of Hopkins's works, his juvenilia. . .

Read the full text of the Dr. Kedzierska's lecture on the Church in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins here

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aubrey DeVere, and Considerations on New Historicism

Patrick Samway, SJ, St. Joseph's College, Philadelphia

I have it on good authority from someone I live with in Philadelphia that Hopkins enjoyed both the language of play and the play of language. The linguistic arabesques and interlocking configuration of images in “Dun's Scotus's Oxford”—such as “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmèd, rook-rackèd, river-rounded”—are, to cite but one example of such language, traps for poetic meditation. Who among us can easily but his or her arms around this language, to find epistemological connections that are grounded metaphysically in things as they are or things as we know them? Thus, from one perspective, Hopkins could easily become the poster boy for deconstructionism, which indeed treats the “play” side of language—as all too often deconstructionists decree that poetry, or novels or any literary texts, for that matter, consist of a series of words without any verifiable “meaning” or “center,” something in my mind antithetical to a Christian world-view where Christ is the Verbum or the Logos, and therefore the content of all words. He is the Alpha and Omega of language, of all possible words in all languages, and thus the originator and receptor of all that can be thought or expressed in language. . .

Read the full text of the Ian Ker's lecture, Hopkins and Newman, here

Gerard Manley Hopkins's Misdirected Faith

David B. Axelrod, New York Poet and Scholar
This lecture was delivered at the 20th Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School, Monasterevin, July 2007 © The Gerard Manley Hopkins Society.

Viewed from the perspective of a non-believer, Gerard Manley Hopkins's unfortunate religious obsession seems responsible for the suppression of one of literary history's great poetic talents and as likely for his early death. That Hopkins is best known and most frequently anthologized for religious poems like “Pied Beauty,” is an unfortunate irony, for it is as likely that his true religion and greatest gift—poetry itself—was seriously damaged and at times completely suppressed by his misdirected zeal for God. . .

Read the rest of the David Axelrod's lecture, Gerard Manley Hopkins's Misdirected Faith , here

Lightness”: A New Perspective on Hopkins

Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

, St. Joseph's University
This lecture was delivered at the 20th Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School, Monasterevin, July 2007 © The Gerard Manley Hopkins Society.

Hopkins is famously known as a difficult poet, even a “heavy” poet, and in truth, he is heavy in content, heavy in style, and heavy in sound. The scholar James Milroy, in his book The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins , notes the poet's “dense verbal structure,” and in print I've called his texture “granitic” and his density “hard as granite.” Today, by way of contrast, I consider a different side of Hopkins, a side much less noticed: his “lightness.” I offer my comments in three parts: (I) confirming Hopkins' heaviness, (II) defining “lightness,” and (III) establishing Hopkins' lightness. . .

Read the rest of Father Feeney SJ's Lecture here