Barnard College, Columbia University, USA.

The problem confronting a religious poet in the latter half of the nineteenth century was how to go beyond sentiment and attitude to uncover transcendence in a world whose intelligibility was passing from theology to science, a world with no place for transcendence.

The problem confronting a religious poet in the latter half of the nineteenth century was not how to express religious feeling or an attitude of religious meditation in the world: the lesser poets of the time (Keble, Patmore, and on a higher level Christina Rossetti, for example) all found an apt register in the given resources of language and representation of their day.

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I Do Otherwise: 'Hopkins's Patterns of Creativity'

Joseph J. Feeney S.J.
St Joseph's University, USA

.These broken sentences, with their call to some neo-Platonic or Romantic 'Fancy', express Hopkins's desire both for inspiration and for appropriate expression, yet tell little about how his creativity functions. Their breathlessness is fitting, but the lines are not overly clear.

More explicit is the poem 'thou art indeed just', dated March 17, 1889. As he looks at the leaves, plants, and nests of spring, Hopkins grieves over his lost inspiration, and imagines creativity in terms of such nature-images as building, breeding, waking, and growing: 'birds build - but not I build'; I 'strain, / Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes'; I need 'rain' for 'my roots'.

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Ross Stuart Kilpatrick
Queen's University, Kingston

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Hopkins's European Mentors: Exploratory Observations

Michael E. Allsopp, Miami, USA.

Delivered at the GM Hopkins International Summer School and published in Studies vol 85 no 338

Introduction - A 'European' Hopkins: The General Arguments

Can you tell me who that critic in the Athenaeum is that writes very long reviews on English and French poets, essayists, and so forth in a style like De Quincey's, very acute in his remarks, provoking, jaunty, and (I am sorry to say) would-be humorous? He always quotes Persian stories (unless he makes them up) and talks about Rabelaisian humour. Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (May 21, 1878)

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"SHE REARS HERSELF" Feminist Possibilities in Hopkins's Poetry

Lesley Higgins

York University, Ontario, Canada

Feminist clarifications — defining feminism

To begin with there is no such thing as "feminism." That is, there is no one single, exclusive theory or practice called "feminism." Instead, we have multiple, diverse, heterogeneous feminist discourses. "Feminism" is as imprecise a term as "Christianity". Feminist practices, on the other hand, involve two interrelated projects: they are, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, "against sexism, where women unite as a biologically oppressed caste; and for feminism, where human beings train to prepare for a transformation of consciousness".

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Influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on Ivor Gurney

Mark William Brown

Jamestown College, Maryland, USA

Ten years ago Michael D. Moore described Ivor Gurney as `the first poet of any significance [apart from Robert Bridges] to exhibit the apparent influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins' . While in no way pretending that his `little essay' was a `thorough comparative inquiry' into the subject, Moore was able to compile an impressive catalogue of internal evidence from Gurney's recently published Collected Poems. Indeed, Richard F. Giles, who edited the monograph in which Moore's essay appeared, pronounced Gurney the one poet `who most fully assimilated the influence of Hopkins,' inasmuch as `Gurney's poems are sometimes original within the bonds [sic] of the Hopkins presence, a feat that most other twentieth-century poets who attempted to imitate Hopkins found impossible' .

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A Japanese Perspective on English Poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins - Language is not the only barrier for Japanese readers of Hopkins's Poetry

Kazuyoshi Enozawa

Keio University, Japan

Not a few people in the English-speaking world who have read Hopkins 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' would own that they have found the whole stuff quite 'tough'; in some parts, even beyond comprehension. If such response is possible for English-speaking poetry-readers, it is not just possible, but - to put it more strongly - almost inevitable for their counterparts in the Far East, to whom English is not their native tongue. I mean Japanese readers of Hopkins's poetry. If their understanding and appreciation of that poetry is in any way limited, it is principally due to the fact that English is not a medium they are born to command, but one they have to master through assiduous learning. Language barrier, however, is not the sole factor by which the Japanese are handicapped in their approach to Hopkins's poetry.

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GM Hopkins:His influence on John Berryman

Gerry Murray

Poet - Critic, Chicago,USA

Countervailing views of the most apt positioning of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the English-American poetic tradition often serve as fodder for both academic and amateur debate. There is, of course, the prevailing double-edged question: Should Hopkins be considered a major minor poet?... or a minor major poet? One supposes this is more than literary hair-splitting. And certainly Hopkins' admirers should quickly assume the high ground that sees this nineteenth-century Jesuit as a major talent with a minor but enduring and ever challenging output.

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John Ruskin: Gerard Manley Hopkins's Silent Don

Philip Ballinger

Gonzaga Univarsity, Spokane, USA

Understanding may come to some seekers as a kind of revelation, but for many it is more akin to the slow growth of roots through soil. The soil in which the understanding of Hopkins may be sought is that of context and influence. What and whose ideas did he encounter, assimilate, reject or transcend? What, or perhaps who, provided him with a foundation upon which his own genius could unfold? Over the decades of Hopkins studies, the question of context and influence has been raised consistently. To my eye a relative gap remains in the study of influence. Who taught Hopkins, that artist of keenest vision, how to `see?' The answer is immediately encountered upon entering the study of Hopkins - it was John Ruskin.

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A Hopkins Discover: Four Unknown Autograph Letters

Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

St. Joseph's, Philadelphia, USA

New, unknown Hopkins Letters Discovered In July 1993, I discovered four unpublished, unknown manuscript letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, all of biographical or literary importance . They are `autograph letters, signed' - handwritten, with signature - and date from 1882 (when Hopkins was 38 years old) to 1888 (a year before his death); three were written to fellow Jesuits (his only extant letters to Jesuits), the fourth to Cardinal Newman. I found them at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, among the papers of the late Hopkins scholar, the Rev Anthony D. Bischoff, S.J., who had discovered them in England and Ireland, probably in 1947, and had kept them for a never completed biography.

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Poetry and nationalism at the Margins — Hopkins and Tagore

Shyamal Bagchee

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

In linking the names of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) my purpose is to explore some issues of poetic imagination, poetic expression, and ideas of nationalism to the extent these can be detected in the works of Tagore and Hopkins. In some cases, Ireland will be the site of enactment of these ideas and these various performances of words and temperaments. "Various," certainly, for this exploration will reveal changeable relationships that are neither fixed nor immutable.Hopkins and Tagore found the word "nationalism" to be troublesome.

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HOPKINS: Poetry and Philosophy

Gerard Casey

National University of Ireland - Dublin

I am going to begin, as all philosophers do, by going back to the ancient Greeks, and then taking a quick tour of the present day, before returning to the ancient Greeks again. Let us begin with the so-called quarrel between philosophy and poetry — What was the reason for this? Well, philosophy was invented at a particular point in time, and in relation to poetry, it was a newcomer.

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The Sea took Pity: Hopkins No. 173

Ross Stuart Kilpatrick

Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

On an undated scrap of paper, G. M. Hopkins had written in pencil the following four lines:

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Style in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Brian Arkins

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Hopkins's style must be viewed against the general nineteenth century background. Romantic poetry espouses an idealist view of language which assumes that the object is known as a category of mind, but by the time of In Memoriam in 1850 Tennyson was expressing deep anxiety about the total dissolution of language: 'For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within' (In Memoriam, V).