World Poets - Gerard Manley Hopkins 100
Lecture-performance with Graham Fawcett and Sue Aldred to mark the centenary of the first publication of a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry in December 1918.
Those who bought this collection and opened it on page 10 (after three pages marked ‘Early Poems’) came face to face with Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, a 35-stanza, 280-line masterpiece presiding over the collection, in the words of its editor Robert Bridges, “as the dragon in the gate”. Those who got past the dragon and found it to be a hitherto unknown species altogether, found themselves further surrounded by Hopkins’s uncannily new voice.
On 11 May 1868, 24-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins set fire to his early poems. Having decided to become a priest, he believed writing poetry was in conflict with his duty to God. Years passed, and he resisted an agonising desire to write. That we have such wonderful poems from him at all is thanks to three minor miracles, one of them an extraordinary coincidence.
Several of Hopkins' poems and the history behind them will feature in Hopkins 100 Night.
