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Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844 - 1889

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Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844 - 1889


Hopkins was born at Startford, Essex, the eldest son of nine children. At Balliol College, Oxford, he became associated with the Oxford Movement and its program of religious reform.

He was received into the Catholic Church in 1866 and then entered the Jesuit Order. He was ordained a priest in 1877, and worked in many parishes. He became Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, a post he held until his death.

Hopkins's position in the history of English literature is rather unusual. His poetry was completely unknown in his lifetime because he refused to publish it, or even admit that he wrote verse. He thought that his interest in poetry conflicted with his vocation as a priest, and would distract him from his duties. However, his superiors encouraged him to write and paint.

The first edition of his poems, edited by a friend and fellow poet, appeared in 1918, thirty years after his dead. Hopkins was immediately perceived as a man born before his time, a twentieth-century poet in an earlier age that couldn't have appreciated the modernity of his talent.

Hopkins' poetry, however, is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century as well as in the tradition of English devotional writing. In his personal way he was still a late Romantic and his mystical and sensual vein stems directly from Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Most of Hopkins' poetry is religious, either because it directly praises to God or because he constantly sees and celebrates God in nature. The physical world is full of God's presence; man shouldn't interfere with it as little as possible and feel the joy it freely gives. He was convinced that industrial and mechanical world was not only ugly but also the product of man's sins.




Hopkins was contrary to the smooth and fluent rhythm prevailing in nineteenth-century poetry and tried to model his metres on what he believed was the common rhythm of spoken English. To pursue this he invented a metrical system that he called "sprung rhythm". By this he meant a stress-based metre where each line of verse is based on a regular number of stresses, or primary accents, and not of syllables, which can vary in number.


Hopkins also invented a terminology of his own. Its two main terms are:


Inscape: the distinct pattern of each thing in the universe, giving it its individuality.

Instress: the property to recognise the 'inscape' of each thing. In a general sense, this is the quality that distinguishes man as the highest being in the universe.


Texts:

The Windhover


Thomas Hardy as a Poet


From 1896 Thomas Hardy published only verse. He wrote some 900 poems during his life, and they echo many of the situations and themes that are found in his novels, though they are less tragical and serious: in the poems there's hope and irony.

They are extremely varied in forms, including narrative ballads, folksongs, anecdotes, and lyrics. A distinctive group of poems is about his dead wife, Emma. (Poems of 1912-l3)


Texts:

In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"

The Convergence of the Twain - (Lines on the loss of the «Titanic»)






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