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»)
