Description:
The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins's continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers--including, among others, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Charles Wright--but they also examine Hopkins's substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world's leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the essays examine both known and unexpected affinities, and The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.
Brief description: Thomas Alan Holmes, a professor of English at East Tennessee State University, specializes in Appalachian and Southern literature. He is co-editor of Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture (Lexington Books) and Jeff Daniel Marion: Poet on the Holston (University of Tennessee Press). His research and creative work have appeared in such journals as Louisiana Literature, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Connecticut Review, Appalachian Heritage, Blue Mesa Review, and Appalachian Journal.
Review Quotes:
'A perennial problem in Hopkins scholarship is that the seemingly unending process of explicating his highly idiosyncratic oeuvre has prevented a serious consideration of the formal and thematic continuities between his writings and those of his contemporaries and successors... Consequently, this collection makes a very welcome contribution to the scholarly conversation.'
A. J. Nickerson, Review 19