Explore the views of Grigson and Ward and with close attention to at least three poems. Develop your own view of Hopkins' poetry.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844. He was born in London of Welsh ancestry, whose family were devout anglicans. He was the eldest of eight children. He was an actively artistic child, especially in music, drawing and poetry. This was encouraged in many Victorian households.
He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he became a follower of Edward Pusey and a member of the Oxford Movement. It was also at Oxford that he forged the friendship with Robert Bridges which would be of importance in his development as a poet, and also wrote many poems. In 1866, following the example of Newman,
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"Nothing is so beautiful as spring." This line is a direct statement - there is no argument. The fast rhythm conveys a sense of urgency. It is full of alliteration. The scene painted is a fresh and idyllic spring paradise. The image of blue suggests that heaven is unspoiled. The lines are in an unusual structure along with the order and obscurity of the words, but what is more important than the order of the words, is the effect they have on the reader. Grigson wrote, "Hopkins observes so closely and has to find a peculiar language for the peculiar." This illustrates Hopkins' need to be different and his use of …show more content…
His faith was strong and willed him on to write his memorable poetry, which was deeply influenced through his faith. We can appreciate Hopkins' poems for the enthusiasm and passion conveyed in them. Whatever his subject matter, he always shows static awareness of what he writes about, whether we perceive that as God or nature, we can share his enjoyment. Due to the complexity of his verse, which was criticized intensely, and different ways to understand the poem, each time you look at it, you are able to pick out something new and
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.
Masson, Davis. Essays Biographical and Critical: Chiefly on English Poets. La Vergne, Tennessee: Lightning Source, Inc., 2007.
Good poetry provides meaningful commentary. One indication of a poem’s success in this is the depth of thought the reader has as a result of the poem. The poems I anthologized may take different
Allison, Barrows, Blake, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry . 3rd Shorter ed. New York: Norton, 1983. 211.
...us 75.1 (Jan. 1991): 150-159. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 58. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Mays, Kelly. "Poems for Further Study." Norton Introduction to Literature. Eleventh Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2013. 771-772. Print.
In this essay I will compare and contrast a collection of different poems by Carol Anne Duffy, Robert Browning, Ben Johnson and Simon Armitage.
Links from the poem below are best read in order from the beginning of the poem to the end
Looking at James Hall's writings we learn that he is comedic with a very underlying theme of change. His poems all seem to circle around a very familiar thing that we are all familiar with. Change whether it is new or old or just realizing we have changed, is all the same. In his works "Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too," "White Trash," and "Preposterous" there are different kinds of change that are discussed.
People, more than any other living thing on this earth, engage in battle, war, and violent acts on one another. We humans, one of the few species that wage war, are capable of love and affection yet kill off more of our own than anything else. We have enough nuclear strength to ensure our extinction as well as the end of the rest of the world with us. Most people are oblivious or choose to ignore the truth about their learned tendencies of brutality. They read books like The Hunger Games, where children are sent to an arena to fight to the death. They watch countless violent action movies on their televisions and think nothing of it. In fact, they are enthralled by it. The vast majority of people are not born with the innate or instinctual inclination to violence, but instead, they are raised to be aggressive. One poet who recognized this tragic flaw in humanity was Edward James Hughes, an eccentric man who lived in the twentieth century. Edward, known as Ted, was considered one of the most successful poets of the 1900s. He wrote fictional poems and children's books. He is well known for his contributions of nature influenced poems containing inner meanings and lessons. Hughes lived in England and the United States where he taught at the University of Massachusetts. Five of his poems contain a specific connection or theme. These works are "Crow's Fall", "Hawk Roosting", "The Jaguar", "Thistles", and "To Paint a Water Lily". In these works, Ted Hughes uses animals or living organisms to represent the violent tendencies of people.
Rupert Brooke was born Rupert Chawner Brooke. He was born on August 3, 1887, in Rugby Warwicshire. His father was a school housemaster. Brooke excelled in both academics and athletics. Since the age of nine he loved poetry. In 1905, Rupert won the school poetry prize. A year later, he attended King’s College Cambridge. At King’s College he became the president of the University Fabian Society. While, there he developed an interest in acting. His home than became famous by his poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Brooke, also, developed his first poem and his first book appeared in 1911. (Academy of American Poets ).
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an innovator whose poetry was not published until decades after his death. Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, which is near London. He attended Balliol College, University of Oxford. While attending the university, Hopkins was sporadically occupied with verse writing. His passion for religion becomes clearly evident during this time through his poems. His poems revealed a very Catholic character, most of them being abortive, the beginnings of things, ruins and wrecks, as he called them. (Gardner 6) In 1866, he converted to Roman Catholicism, during the Oxford movement. John Henry Newman received him into the Roman Catholic Church. He left Oxford to become a priest, and entered the Jesuit Order in 1868. This is the time when Gerard Manley Hopkins presented a conflict of a man torn between two vocations, religion and the aesthetic world. He also presented a heroic struggle of a man who was so dedicated to one profession that he deliberately sacrificed another profession based on the belief that God willed it to be so.
Hopkins age was defined by the change from romanticism to realism. This was a slow change but it was one that was greatly needed by Hopkins. His work was not very well liked by people because it was about things that were against the church (Bloom p.90). During his time this was a big mistake, but in the same sense this portrayed realism to its fullest. Although some of Hopkins’ poems seem disturbing, they are actually excellent pieces of work. He portrayed realism by only writing about things that were realistic to him and his society. People did not accept Hopkins’ poetry because they did not like him; they did not accept it because it went against everything they believed in. The church was the most important thing in peoples’ lives during this era and most of Hopkins’ work were about things that went against the church and its beliefs. Even though people did not accept his poems during his time, they are very well accepted now and are considered masterpieces of his era.
The links from the poem below are best read in order from the beginning of the poem to the end.
The SS Deutschland, an iron passenger steamship of the Norddeutscher Lloyd line, was on a maiden voyage to New York from Bremen. On December 4, 1875, the Deutschland was on its way to New York from Bremerhaven, with 123 emigrants. The weather conditions for the steamship was horrible; a blizzard hit the steamship on the Kentish Knock, an area off the coast of Kent and Essex in England. The crew of the Deutschland tried an attempt to go astern but it failed when the stress fractured the Deutschland’s propeller. The vessel began to sink, and the sea began to break over the steamship and the wind rose to gale force; consequently, an order to abandon ship. On December 7, 1875, 135 out of 213 people were saved from the wreck. Among the victims of the wreck were five Franciscan nuns from Salzkotten, Westphalia. The Franciscan nuns had been emigrating to escape the anti-Catholic Falk Laws, legislative bills enacted in the German Kingdom of Prussia during the Kulturkampf conflict with the Catholic Church. The Franciscan nuns’ death inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to compose his longest Christian theme poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” dedicated to their memory.