Description: "How did a Catholic priest who died a failure become one of the world's greatest poets? Discover in his own words the struggle for faith that gave birth to some of the best spiritual poetry of all time. Gerard Manley Hopkins deserves his place among the greatest poets in the English language. He ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English-language poets, surpassed only by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth. Yet when the English Jesuit priest died of typhoid fever at age forty-four, he considered his life a failure. He never would have suspected that his poems, which would not be published for another twenty-nine years, would eventually change the course of modern poetry and influence such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Like his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Hopkins revolutionized poetic language."--
Brief description: One of the great Christian poets of the modern era, Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, England in 1844. At age twenty-two he left a promising career at Oxford to become a Jesuit priest. When he died of typhoid fever in 1899 at age forty-four, none of his poems had been published.
Review Quotes: From the start Hopkins's literary champions have been puzzled, skeptical, confused, or even hostile toward his conversion. . . . Ellsberg refutes these condescending views of the poet and the church. She pays a great poet the respect of taking his core beliefs seriously. . . . The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins combines scholarly accuracy with critical acumen. Ellsberg's extensive commentary on Hopkins's verse and prose texts both elucidates his thought and provides illuminating context for the poems. Meanwhile she sustains her larger argument on the spiritual development of the author as a paradigmatic Catholic life of consecration, contemplation, sacrifice, and indeed sanctity. --Dana Gioia, poet laureate of California and author of Can Poetry Matter?, from the foreword