Poems and Prose [Paperback]

Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his ‘creative violence’ and insistence on thesoundof poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus and the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and ‘resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors.' The poems, letters, and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life and published posthumously in 1918.
 
His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice. Intense, vital, and individual, his writing is the ‘terrible crystal’ through which the soul—theinscape, the nature of things—may be illuminated.Poems and ProseIntroduction
Note to Tenth Impression
SECTION A - POETRY

Four Early Poems (1865-1866)
1. The Alchemist in the City
2. Let me be to Thee as the circling bird
3. Heaven-Haven
4. The Habit of Perfection

Poems (1876-1889)
Author's Preface (with explanatory notes by the Editor)
5. The Wreck of the Deutschland
6. Penmaen Pool
7. The Silver Jubilee
8. God's Grandeur
9. The Starlight Night
10. Spring
11. The Lantern out of Doors
12. The Sea and the Skylark
13. The Windhover
14. Pied Beauty
15. Hurrahing in Harvest
16. The Caged Skylark
17. In the Valley of the Elwy
18. The Loss of the Eurydice
19. The May Magnificat
20. Binsey Poplars
21. Duns Scotus's Oxford
22. Henry Purcell
23. Peace
24. The Bugler's First Communion
25. Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice
26. Andromeda
27. The Candle Indoors
28. The Handsome Heart
29. At thlĂ)