The Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive 2004 offers a free resource to students, scholars and enthusiasts for Hopkins and his poety. Lectures contained here include: Gerard Manley Hopkins in Ireland; an assessment of Norman White and his Hopkins Scholarship; Jesuit Influence on the Life and Works of Flannery O'Connor; Kingfishers Catching Fire - Imagery and a Suggestion and more. Lecturers include: Patrick Samway SJ, Brian Arkins, Desmond Egan, Sakiko Sagagi, Peter Milward SJ.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in Ireland
This Lecture was delivered at Hopkins Literary Festival 2004
Peter Milward S.J.,
Japan and United Kingdom
Poor Hopkins! We can't help feeling sympathy for him, caught as he was in the sad predicament he describes for us so poignantly in the 'terrible sonnets' of his Dublin years. Surely there can be no poems in the whole compass of English literature that so painfully portray such agony as he feels in his Irish exile. It may all be seen as coming to a precisely defined climax in the sonnet, 'To seem the stranger'.
This Lecture was delivered at Hopkins Literary Festival 2004
Brian Arkins,
Classics Professor (Emeritus)
NUI Galway
Arkins assesses biographies of, and articles on Hopkins, by Dr. Norman White, one of the world's leading authorities on the poet. Until recently, Dr. White was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in UCD.
Major works questioned are: Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1992); Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales (Bridgend 1998); and (Dublin 2002).
Jesuit Influence on the Life and Works of Flannery O'Connor
This Lecture was delivered at Hopkins Literary Festival 2004
Patrick Samway, S.J.,
St. Joseph's,
Philadelphia, USA
The next time you are waiting in the departure lounge at the Dublin Airport, I suggest you read the short biographies of famous Irish-Americans featured there. ;Flannery O'Connor's notes correctly that her parents were of Irish immigrant stock. Yet the writer states with the brash assurance of someone trying to sell a certain bridge linking Brooklyn and Manhattan that O'Connor regularly visited the film director <strong>John Huston; at his home in County Galway. There is no evidence, alas, that O'Connor ever set foot in the land of her ancestors. She had planned such a trip in 1958, after a short visit to Lourdes and Paris, but her declining health prevented from her from doing so. She indicated in a letter to her friend Ashley Brown that she did not feel well enough to go to Ireland, but she wished others of her group all the best if they wish to disport themselves at the famous Baloney Castle as she phrased it (The Habit of Being 277).
Jesuit Influence on the Life and Novels of Flannery O'Connor
Kingfishers Catching Fire-Imagery and a Suggestion
Desmond Egan Poet and Artistic Director of the GM Hopkins International Literary Festival. The autograph draft of this sonnet is undated and the poem, untitled. Large colons in front of lines 9, 11, and 12 indicate that their first syllable is stressed; while a large colon between 'grace' and 'that' shows that both words are to be stressed. Norman Mackenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in <strong>St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales . . .
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. Read more
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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