Selected Prose (Oxford Standard Authors)

Oxford University Press, 1980. Trade paperback. (ISBN 0-19-281272-6) Edited by Gerald Roberts. Lovely cover illustration: detail from "Bluebells and other Flowers Growing Round a Tree Stump" by H. Larpent Roberts, Private Collection. Good copy, pages browning, good wrappers. Gerard Manley Hopkins became a Catholic in 1866 at the age of twenty-two and joined the Society of Jesus two years later. It was after this that he wrote the poetry that brought him posthumous fame, but his prose writings, here in Gerald Robert's fully annotated selection, bring us closer to the man and show the development of his struggle between conflicting vocations. His intelligence was wide-ranging, and he possessed great versatility. In his Journal he expressed his love of nature, often in the subtle, highly unconventional style of his verse, while his sermons vary from graceful eloquence to quaint simplicity. In the letters to his family and friends (starting in 1862, and including many to Robert Bridges), he writes of everyday incidents and contemporary politics, and also of literary matters and his own innovations, among them the development of 'sprung rhythm'; but the letters also lay are is intense religious conviction, often urged insistently on his correspondents, and bear witness to the domestic and inner drama of his conversion. The picture that emerges is fascinating and deeply moving: Hopkins was bitterly aware that in emulating his hero, Christ, who 'held himself back', he was deliberately repressing his own genius. Literature, biography, religion.