Gerard Manley Hopkins initially planned to become a poet-artist. For five years he trained his eye, learned about contemporary art and architecture, and made friends in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In her fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Phillips, whose knowledge of Hopkins's poems is expert, uses letters, new archival material, and contemporary publications to reconstruct the visual world Hopkins knew between 1862 and 1889, and especially in the 1860s, with its illustrated journals, art exhibitions, Gothic architecture, photographic shows, and changing art criticism. Phillips identifies three artistic contexts for the Hopkins's life: his childhood circle of artistic relatives who were important in shaping his early vision; his friends at university and the criticism he absorbed while there that inflected his view as a young man; and the mature religious beliefs which came to govern his understanding of a visual world interconnected with an eternal one. With chapters devoted to Hopkins own drawings, and to visual theories of the time, Phillips is able to suggests fresh links between this visual world and the startling originality of Hopkins's mature writing that will alter radically our understanding of Hopkins's practice as a poet.

A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was not only one of the most gifted Victorian poets, he was a compelling diarist who used his journals for everything from daily to-do lists to the most intimate spiritual self-assessments. This volume represents Hopkins as a man of extremes, both emotionally and psychologically. There are mundane memoranda about neckties to purchase or letters to write, but also exacting revisions of poems. There are entries of quiet rapture, his attentioncaught by the beauty of the natural world. Paintings, sculptures, and works of literature are stringently assessed, his aesthetic principles freely exercised. There are also nightmares relived;undergraduate 'sins' unsparingly recorded; 'signs' of heavenly mercy carefully noted. This is the first unexpurgated edition of all extant diaries. The entries extend from September 1863, during his second term at Oxford, until February 1875, while studying theology as a Jesuit in his beloved Wales, and from February 1884 until July 1885, while Hopkins was living at a 'third remove' in Dublin.

Through the lens of Hopkins's 'masterwork', The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins readdresses Hopkins's frequently overlooked mysticism as an interior narrative within his corpus. Drawing on a range of religious, literary and visual traditions from Augustine's Confessions to the seventeenth-century spiritual emblem, this book demonstrates the ways in which the Wreck deliberately constructs and conceals a mystical and contemplative narrative. Typology and allegory are some of the important hermeneutic tools used in this re-reading of Hopkins, relating the poet to the discursive tradition surrounding the Old Testament Song of Songs, the philosophical theology of the Greek Fathers, and, perhaps most intriguingly, the meditative and visual tradition of the baroque heart-emblem. On the centenary of the publication of Hopkins’s poems, this book places the writer firmly within a mystical tradition, necessitating a fundamental reconsideration of the legacy of this major Victorian poet.

This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

This book explores the poetics of “fancy” in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a term often paired with imagination in well-known Romantic poetics. It sheds new light on this concept, which is described positively in Hopkins’s poetics and later becomes the essence of his idiosyncratic concept of “inscape”, as shown here. Chapter One discusses the influence of Coleridge and Ruskin on Hopkins’s poetics of fancy, Hopkins’s experiments in the language of inspiration produced by fancy before his conversion to Catholicism, his idea of inscape as revealed by fancy, and the relation between his fancy and the aesthetics of Romantic poets such as Keats and Wordsworth. Chapter Two focuses on the concept of fancy in Hopkins’s predecessors, William Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who, along with Coleridge and Ruskin, had a major influence on the writer, leading him to pen the play “Floris in Italy” and the sonnet series “The Beginning of the End” in order to experiment with the language of inspiration which he argued only fancy could produce. This chapter also discusses Hopkins’s interest in J. E. Millais and the impact of the Pre-Raphaelites in the development of his poetics of fancy, Hopkins’s fancy as metalanguage, the contrast between his fancy and the impressionism of Walter Pater, and the role of fancy in Hopkins’s sonnets. Chapter Three treats Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism and his views on Catholic art, including his interest in William Butterfield and the Gothic Revival, as well as the abrupt parallelism between Christ and fancy in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”. Hopkins’s poetic diction is a condensed evocation of art and nature with fancy as the source of his inspiration. His metaphors are not ordinary figures expressing the attributes of things, but are autonomous and have their nature within themselves. Hopkins’s poetic idiosyncrasy is generated by the parallelism between distinctive and autonomous images which repeat the surprise and ecstasy of the poet contemplating art and nature. He endeavoured to achieve the poetry of inspiration with his emphasis on fancy as the basis of his poetic diction so as to reinstate it as the source of a “new Realism”. Hopkins’s fancy foregrounds the discontinuous nature of a new poetic diction, which demonstrates unfettered combinations between autonomous images and signs in metalanguage in advance of semiotic literary theories.

What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch where one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.

Hopkins was an experimental and idiosyncratic writer whose work remains important for any student of Victorian literature. This guidebook offers extensive introductory comments on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of his work. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume cross-references thoroughly between sections and presents useful suggestions for further reading.

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

An analysis of the writing life of the nineteenth-century English poet documents his experiences as a Jesuit priest, his struggles with depression, and the spiritual journey that informed his beliefs. 12,500 first printing.