Poesia inglesa

Poesía Inglesa de los siglos XIX y XX

Trabajo 1&2
Gerard Manley Hopkins

1. THE WINDHOVER: To Christ our Lord
2. SPRING AND FALL to a young child

Biography
 
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 in an Anglican family. His parents fostered from an early age their eldest son's commitment to religion and to the creative arts. His mother was an avid reader, his father wrote and reviewedpoetry and even authored a novel. Hopkins also had a number of relatives who were interested in literature, music, and the visual arts, some as dabblers and some professionals; he and his siblings showed similarly creative dispositions from an early age, and Hopkins enjoyed a great deal of support and encouragement for his creative endeavours. He studied drawing and music and at one point hopedto become a painter as two of his brothers did. Even his earliest verses displayed a vast verbal talent.
 
Hopkins was born in Essex, England, in an area that was then being transformed by industrial development. His family, for the reasons of healthy and religious upbringing moved to the relatively undefiled neighbourhood of Hampstead. From 1854 to 1863 Hopkins attended Highgate Grammar School,where he studied under Canon Dixon, who became a lifelong friend and who encouraged his interest in Keats. At Oxford he was a student of Walter Pater and befriended the poet Robert Bridges and Coleridge's grandson. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by Christina Rossetti and was interested in medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and developments in Victorian religious poetry. He alsobecame preoccupied with the major religious controversies that were fermenting within the Anglican Church. At Oxford witnessed a debate taking place between two reform groups: the Tractarians, whose critics accused them of being too close to Catholicism in their emphasis on ritual and church traditions, and the Broad Church Movement, whose followers believed that all religious faith should bescrutinized on a basis of empirical evidence and logic. Immersed in intense debate over such issues, Hopkins entered into a process of soul-searching, and after much deliberation abandoned the religion of his family and converted to Catholicism. He threw his whole heart and life behind his conversion, deciding to become a Jesuit priest.
 
Hopkins undertook a lengthy course of training for thepriesthood; for seven years he wrote almost no verse, having decided that one who had pledged his life to God should not pursue poetry. Only at the influence of church officials did Hopkins resume his poetry, while studying theology in North Wales, in 1875. He wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland in 1876 and, during the course of the next year, composed many of his most famous sonnets. Hopkins's subjectmatter in these mature poems is wholly religious. He believed that by making his work religious-themed he might make poetry a part of his religious vocation. These post-1875 poems follow a style quite different from that of Hopkins's earlier verse. He spent the last years of his short life quite unhappily in Dublin, where he wrote a group of melancholy poems often referred to as the "TerribleSonnets" or "Sonnets of Desolation"; they exquisitely render the spiritual anguish for which Hopkins is famous. The great poet died of typhoid fever in 1877 in Dublin in 1877.
 
 
Hopkins's Poetry
 
 
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the greatest 19th century poets of religion, of nature, and of inner anguish. In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God and it is by "reading" theworld that humans can approach God and learn about Him. Hopkins preceived the environmental crisis of the Victorian period as connected with that era's spiritual crisis, and many of his poems lamented on man's indifference to the destruction of sacred natural and religious order. He saw new discoveries (such as the new explanations for phenomena in electricity or astronomy) as further evidence...