Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (Flamingo) - Softcover

Martin, Robert Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006544800 ISBN 13: 9780006544807

Publisher: Flamingo, 1992

Synopsis

Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter . . . [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Bernard Martin (1918-1999) was born in Illinois. He had a distinguished academic career and was Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University, USA, from 1951 to 1975, before retiring to Oxford, where he became a writer. He published ten books about the Victorian era, including biographies such as Tennyson, the Unquiet Heart in 1980 and A Very Private Life in 1991.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Martin (English/Princeton) brings his ranging knowledge of English Victorian life and his understanding of the poetic sensibility (Tennyson, 1980; With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward Fitzgerald, 1985) to the subtle, obscure, introverted, and spare life and works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), the Jesuit priest whose work, published first in 1918, 29 years after his death, is considered as influential as T.S. Eliot's in initiating the modern movement in poetry. Chapter one, ``The Importance of Being Manley,'' introduces the major struggle in Hopkins's life--a strong sexuality conflicted between what his family expected of him in giving him a name he seldom used and his own homoerotic impulses, suppressed, dislocated, and ultimately projected on nature and God, producing his religiously charged sensual poetry. Educated at Oxford, Hopkins later discovered in the discipline, intellectuality, and fellowship of the Jesuit order a refuge for his quirky personality, querulous nature, and personal style of piety. His subtle and unique philosophy of ``inscape,'' a highly complex sense of identity, and ``instress,'' the thrust of energy that allows one to apprehend the unique identity of each individual, found expression in a cryptic, dense, evocative experimental poetry, manipulating syntax, diction, and rhythm to reflect his sense of himself, his world, and his very personal relationship with God. Beset by melancholy, fears of his own unworthiness, and guilt at his lack of accomplishment, he published only one, nearly inscrutable, poem during his lifetime: The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875), describing the drowning of five nuns in a shipwreck. Along with sympathy, tact, appreciation, and humor, Martin brings new information from previously unpublished sources to elucidate the shadows in which Hopkins's life and poetry had been enfolded by well-meaning friends, scholars, and the critics who have made an industry of him. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0006544800
• ISBN 13: 9780006544807
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464