Gerard Manley Hopkins - To Seem a Stranger -Everyman - documentary

Here's "To Seem a Stranger" the 1986 Everyman Documentary a definitive documentary about the great Gerard Manley Hopkins who grew up not far from where London held the 2012 Olympics in Stratford East London. In my humble opinion Britain never produced a greater poet his unique use of language and sprung rhythm and metaphysical imagery make his poetry pure versical magic. The poetry is read definitively by the Brilliant Paul R Webtser who has an excellent channel at youtube

https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulRWebster

Gerard Manley Hopkins, (born July 28, 1844, Stratford, Essex, Eng.—died June 8, 1889, Dublin), English poet and Jesuit priest, one of the most individual of Victorian writers. His work was not published in collected form until 1918, but it influenced many leading 20th-century poets.

Hopkins was the eldest of the nine children of Manley Hopkins, an Anglican, who had been British consul general in Hawaii and had himself published verse. Hopkins won the poetry prize at the Highgate grammar school and in 1863 was awarded a grant to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he continued writing poetry while studying classics. In 1866, in the prevailing atmosphere of the Oxford Movement, which renewed interest in the relationships between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman. The following year, he left Oxford with such a distinguished academic record that Benjamin Jowett, then a Balliol lecturer and later master of the college, called him “the star of Balliol.” Hopkins decided to become a priest. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1868 and burned his youthful verses, determining “to write no more, as not belonging to my profession.”

Until 1875, however, he kept a journal recording his vivid responses to nature as well as his expression of a philosophy for which he later found support in Duns Scotus, the medieval Franciscan thinker. Hopkins’ philosophy emphasized the individuality of every natural thing, which he called “inscape.” To Hopkins, each sensuous impression had its own elusive “selfness”; each scene was to him a “sweet especial scene.”

In 1874 Hopkins went to St. Beuno’s College in North Wales to study theology. There he learned Welsh, and, under the impact of the language itself as well as that of the poetry and encouraged by his superior, he began to write poetry again. Moved by the death of five Franciscan nuns in a shipwreck in 1875, he broke his seven-year silence to write the long poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in which he succeeded in realizing “the echo of a new rhythm” that had long been haunting his ear. It was rejected, however, by the Jesuit magazine The Month. He also wrote a series of sonnets strikingly original in their richness of language and use of rhythm, including the remarkable “The Windhover,” one of the most frequently analyzed poems in the language. He continued to write poetry, but it was read only in manuscript by his friends and fellow poets, Robert Bridges (later poet laureate), Coventry Patmore, and the Rev. Richard Watson Dixon. Their appreciation of the strangeness of the poems (for the times) was imperfect, but they were, nevertheless, encouraging.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1877, Hopkins served as missioner, occasional preacher, and parish priest in various Jesuit churches and institutions in London, Oxford, Liverpool, and Glasgow and taught classics at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. He was appointed professor of Greek literature at University College, Dublin, in 1884. But Hopkins was not happy in Ireland; he found the environment uncongenial, and he was overworked and in poor health. From 1885 he wrote another series of sonnets, beginning with “Carrion Comfort.” They show a sense of desolation produced partly by a sense of spiritual aridity and partly by a feeling of artistic frustration. These poems, known as the “terrible sonnets,” reveal strong tensions between his delight in the sensuous world and his urge to express it and his equally powerful sense of religious vocation.

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