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Hopkins Literary Festival 2010 Lectures

The Wisdom of Cardinal Newman

A survey in a national daily newspaper some years ago on the attitudes of Irish Catholics to faith and life asked Catholics if they would follow, when making serious moral choices, the teaching of the Church or the light of Conscience. The newspaper made much of the fact that the vast majority opted to follow conscience. This option was widely interpreted as a rejection of authority, and, specifically, of the authority of the Catholic Church. But the problem perhaps was in the original question whose wording assumed that Catholics who listen to and obey the teaching Church are going against Conscience and are then alienated from their true selves!

The Wisdom of John Henry Newman

Pied Beauty - Two Translations of a Hopkins poem Pied Beauty by Finnish poet Kirsti Kunas

Kirsi Kunnas, a distinguished Finnish poet and a translator, mostly known in her home country as a unique writer of children's poetry, published her own Collected Poems – poems for adults, this time – in the late 1990's. In the end of the book there is a sequence of her translations as well. Kunnas has chosen some samples poetry translations (translations of Federico Garcia Lorca, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Viiu Härm, Ellen Niit, Paul-Eerik Rummo). But the first poem in this sequence is Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

A Finnish Version of Hopkins's Poem Pied Beauty

African Writers, Poets, discuss Hopkins's African Sound

Gerard Manley Hopkins's African Sound is explored by African scholars - Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike who suggest post—independence Nigerian rap poets, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and John Pepper Clark are ineffectual imitators of Hopkins.
Eliott Clarke discusses influence of Hopkins's African Sound

Epiphanies and Ecstasy in Hopkins Poetry

I never listen to music, especially when I am alone in my room, but a variety of memories come back to me. Something stirs in my soul urging me to grasp something that I can't fully grasp – Love, Truth, Beauty perhaps. A loneliness surrounds me but it is not a gloomy loneliness, although there is an edging of sorrow to it. All a sign of incompleteness. But also a stirring joy. Themes of love and faith border the contemplation ...
Epiphanies and Ectasy in Hopkins's Poetry here

Hopkins and the Migration of Musical Notation to his Verse

Last year I talked about Hopkins's prosodic markings and their significance for the oral reader. I had noticed that the large colon, employed between two stressed syllables to indicate a hiatus, gave the sense of syncopation. Hopkins does not use the word for this diacritic - yet what he says about its use tells us that this is exactly how it was to be used...
Hopkins and Migration of Musical Notation

The Dragon in the Gate - the Wreck of the Deutschland

Robert Bridges once described “The Wreck of the Deutchland” as ‘the dragon in the gate' standing as it did as an imposing hurdle to the rest of Hopkins poetry. It does however give us an intriguing insight into the multifaceted personality of the dragon keeper himself and the attraction to sacrifice and suffering that he uses to recommend himself to his God and which was often a complete contrast to his sense of humour and normality in his personal affiliations and happy family relationships ...


The Dragon at the Gate by Ciaráin O Hare

Links to 2010 Hopkins Lectures

Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023

Links to other 2012 Hopkins Literary Festival Lectures

Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2022

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