Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems

The thoroughly insightful and engaging study guide offers a detailed commentary on the poetry of Hopkins, exploring the significance of contemporary cultural issues and the poet's life as Catholic convert and Jesuit priest.

Contents

Part 1, Life and Times, traces Hopkins's life from his early schooldays, his undergraduate years at Oxford and conversion to Catholicism, to his work as a Jesuit scholar and poet-priest.

Part 2, Literary Strategies, explains the core principles of Hopkins's innovative and challenging poetry, including sections on inscape, interests and sprung rhythm.

Part 3, Reading Hopkins, provides a detailed critical commentary on most of the major poems: The Wreck of the Deutschland, God's Grandeur, The Starlight Night, As Kingfishers, Spring, The Sea and the Skylark, In the Valley of the Elwy, The Windhover, Pied Beauty, The Caged Skylark, Hurrahing in Harvest, The Lantern out of Doors, Duns Scotus's Oxford, Binsey Poplars, Henry Purcell, The Candle Indoors, Felix Randal, Spring and Fall, Inversnaid, Ribblesdale, To What Serves Mortal Beauty, Patience, the six 'Terrible Sonnets', Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves, Harry Ploughman, Tom's Garland, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, 'Thou art indeed just', 'To R.B.' Part 4, Critical Reception, explores the history of Hopkins criticism from that of his own contemporaries to twentieth century and current critical approaches. This section also provides a guide to further reading and some useful websites.

About the author

John Gilroy took his BA at the University of Newcastle and his MPhil at the University of Warwick. He is co-author of A Commentary on Wordsworth’s Prelude: Books 1–5 (London: RKP, 1983), Philip Larkin: Selected Poems (Humanities ebooks ‘Insights’, 2009) and Romantic Literature (York Companions to Literature series, London: York Press, 2010). He is a part-time lecturer in the English Department at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a course director for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education’s international and residential programmes.