on>
“By the Gate of the Sacred,” portrait of Gerard Manley Hopkins, woodcut by Robert McGovern
The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins
Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings
Edited by Margaret R. Ellsberg
Foreword by Dana Gioia
PLOUGH PUBLISHING HOUSE
Published by Plough Publishing House
Walden, New York
Robertsbridge, England
Elsmore, Australia
Copyright © 2017 by Plough Publishing House
All rights reserved.
PRINT ISBN: 978-0-87486-822-7
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-87486-018-4
MOBI ISBN: 978-0-87486-019-1
PDF ISBN: 978-0-87486-025-2
21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Cover portrait detail by Robert McGovern.
Illustrations by Gerard Manley Hopkins courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
In memory of Mary Frances Dunham, 1954–2015
Contents
Index of Titles and First Lines
Foreword
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS is a singular figure in English-language literature. No other poet has achieved such major impact with so small a body of writing. His mature work consists of only forty-nine poems – none of which he saw published in his lifetime. Even when one adds the two dozen early poems written at Oxford and various fragments found in notebooks after his death, his literary oeuvre is meager in size, even for a writer who died in his forties.
Yet Hopkins occupies a disproportionally large and influential place in literary history. Invisible in his own lifetime, he now stands as a major poetic innovator who, like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, prefigured the Modernist revolution. A Victorian by chronology, Hopkins belongs by sensibility to the twentieth century – an impression strengthened by the odd fact that his poetry was not published until 1918, twenty-nine years after his death. This posthumous legacy changed the course of modern poetry by influencing some of the leading poets, including W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney.
As W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie observed in the fourth edition of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), “The steady growth and consolidation of the fame of Gerard Manley Hopkins has now reached a point from which, it would seem, there can be no permanent regression.” There is a mixture of relief and wonder in their statement. No one would have predicted the poet’s exalted position when the first edition was published, not even its editor, Robert Bridges, who spent much of his
