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Lectures Hopkins Literary Festival 2014.





Catherine Phillips,
Cambridge University,
Editor: Hopkins Letters,
This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival 2014


On Sept 10 1864 the twenty-year old Gerard Manley Hopkins received a letter from his Oxford friend, A. W.  Mowbray Baillie: ‘Dear Baillie, - Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead [the Hopkins family’s home]. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at once on an answer… The letter-writer on principle does not make his letter only an answer; it is a work embodying perhaps answers to questions put by his correspondent but that is not its main motive. ...
Hopkins Correspondence with Newman Catherine Philips


Hopkins’ Hidden God: Inscape, Pascal and the Aesthetic Wager

This lecture was delivered during the Hopkins Literary Festival 2014
Robert Smart,
Quinnipiac University
USA.

In order to keep this exploratory excursus within the presentation time limits, this paper will be a kind of thoughtful ramble, not unlike Hopkins’ meanderings through the Kildare countryside. I have in mind to triangulate three large areas of understanding: Hopkins’ ...
Read Robert Smart lecture on Hopkins's Hidden God here


Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Egan: Absence and Presence

Kevin T. McEneaney, Poet
New York.

This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival July 2014

Algernon Swinburne had exalted Victor Hugo as semi-divine poet in his Fortnightly Review of L’Année terrible (1872). Praising Hugo’s domestic poems rather than his political poems, Swinburne created a trend for domestic poems in Victorian England. Hugo had been writing domestic poems since at least 1842, for example, “My Two Daughters,” where his daughters are depicted with white carnations trembling in the breeze like butterflies ...

Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Egan


D e s i d e r a t a

Thomas McCarthy, OP
Newbridge College,
County Kildare,
This Lecture was delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival July 2014

The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks.

IT WAS A HARD THING—GMH The Major Works, Oxford’s World Classics, 2002,
Oxford, 29].

This work is from now on called [‘Oxford’.] When Jesus saw two men following him, he turned and asked, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said, ‘Rabbi, where do you live?’ His answer was: ‘Come and see’ [cf Jn 1:37-39]. Straightforward. They were anxious to know something... I am not sure they really wanted to know where Jesus lived, but when you are caught off-guard while 'looking'/seeking to learn without being noticed, some answer will come out of your mouth. Perhaps they did not know what they were looking for, but there was a certain interest being shown in Jesus and in what was happening near Jesus. For one thing, that 'wanting to know' was a kind of desire...

Desiderata


Re-reading the Wreck

Eamon Kiernan,
University of Magdeburg
Germany.

When I first tried to read The Wreck of the Deutschland, I was an unemployed former student drifting among the London Irish. I was in Battersea Public Library. At the desk next to mine sat a mentally-ill woman who was drawing circles on sheets of paper with a pencil. The Wreck seemed very strange, and I did not understand it. But it evoked a mood in me: one of tense, fearful darkness, drumming towards the light. And it seemed to fit the sheets of paper filling up with little circles beside me. If there be a natural readership for this poem, I think it might be such as that troubled woman.

Re-reading the Wreck



Links to Hopkins Festival Lectures 2014

Gerard Manley Hopkins Correspondence

Hopkins sermons

Re-reading the Wreck of the Deutchland

Desiderata

Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Egan


Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023