Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1966. In his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins was known as a poet only by a small circle of his friends. More than any other major Victorian writer, he was recovered and presented as a poet to modern readers by editors and scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. This book analyzes how and to what extent the presuppositions of these critics have dictated the modern conception of Hopkins's work. Bender seeks to dispel, once and for all, the notion that Hopkins was a naif poet. He provides an analysis of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric relative to the classical background of Hopkins's style and the structure in his poetry. He maintains that especially in Hopkins's more extreme work, such as The Wreck of the Deutschland, there are precedents for the structure of the poem itself, the structure of the sentences within the poem, and its sensual and obscure imagery in the classical literature that Hopkins knew so well. Bender's study suggests two highly
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Critical Response to the First and Second Editions of the Poems
Chapter 2. The Publication of the Prose and a Note on the Unpublished Notebooks
Chapter 3. The Non-Logical Structure of "The Wreck of the Deutschland": Hopkins and Pindar
Chapter 4. Non-Logical Syntax: Latin and Greek Hyperbaton
Chapter 5. Metaphysical Imagery and Explosive Meaning: Crashaw, Hopkins, and Martial
Index
