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Distributed for University College Dublin Press

Hopkins in Ireland

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent five unhappy years in Ireland before his death in 1889, during which time he wrote perhaps the most interesting group of all his poems. Although he is one of the most well known and liked of poets, he is still one of the least understood. This is a full-length study of Hopkins’s time in Ireland, when he was Professor of Classics at University College Dublin, and it is both a biography and a critical account of the poetry. Norman White examines the poet’s personality and shows him as a sick and self-lacerating human being. This is not a conventional biography and it does not aim to be an account of Hopkins’s doings in Ireland: the important things that happened to Hopkins in Ireland were mental, and so the book is an exploration of the poems written in Ireland largely as a form of psychological biography, working outwards from Hopkins’s most intimate creations.

260 pages

Literature and Literary Criticism:


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Table of Contents

Hopkins in England, Wales and Scotland England and Ireland Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves To Seem the Stranger No Worst Worse Now Done Darkness Mortal Beauty The Portrait’ The Epithalamian Tom, Dick and Harry Soldiering That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire Retreat at Rahan, New Year 1889 Swan Song.

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