The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press w/ LUP) - Softcover

Westover, Daniel; Wright, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942954204 ISBN 13: 9781942954200

Publisher: Clemson University Press w/ LUP, 2016

Synopsis

The discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry in the twentieth century was a revelation for postwar poets, who discovered in both Hopkins's style and subject matter a voice seemingly bottled for their own time. This influence has not faded in the twenty-first century; in fact, it has grown all the more pervasive as poets from many backgrounds and nations have found, in the voice of this nineteenth-century Jesuit, a revolutionary way of addressing contemporary concerns relating to human imagination, ecology, "green" ethics, the role of art, and individual spirituality. The poets collected in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins engage with Hopkins in diverse ways. Some mention Hopkins or address some aspect of his life. Others channel his innovative poetics or address important Hopkinsian themes. All demonstrate the centrality of his influence in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, critics have mostly neglected the importance of Hopkins as a contemporary model, instead pinning his influence to the early twentieth century. In a climate where high modernism, Whitmanic free verse, and the confessional lyric are often held up as contemporary poetry's dominant forerunners, this book proposes a more complex genealogy, tracing back to Hopkins and his influential early admirers current strands of emotional and spiritual openness, pleasure in word play and sonic textures, and veneration of the dynamic material world.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Some years after the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins, his work, dazzling, innovative, and explosive, woke the world. Now, in the twenty-first century, we have in our hands The World Is Charged, a magnificent volume that helps us understand, for starters, the influence Hopkins wields on contemporary poetry.  On the evidence of the poems included here, that influence is stronger than ever. More important, that influence has resulted in a plethora of poems that stun, as Hopkins himself stunned. The poets in this volume are splendid practitioners of verse and deserve celebration themselves, for their poems, like Hopkins's, are counter, original, spare, and strange, to borrow his own words. Sprung rhythm, curtal sonnets, caudate sonnets, inscape, and the unexpected word create an intense music and imagery that celebrate the world as it is. Their poems also suggest a series of views of Hopkins that demonstrate the depth and reach of his work. The editors, William Wright and Daniel Westover, provide clear and clarifying introductory statements. They have also made perfect choices. The distinguished Paul Mariani offers us a verbal portrait of Hopkins in a concluding essay. This anthology belongs on every poet's, every English professor's, and every serious reader's bookshelf."

−Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems

About the Author

William Wright is Writer in Residence, University of Tennessee.

Daniel Westover is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English, East Tennessee State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clemson University Press w/ LUP
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1942954204
• ISBN 13: 9781942954200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164