Though his slim body of work was unknown during his lifetime, and continues to present great challenges to contemporary readers, Gerard Manley Hopkins today is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of English poets. He is a great resource for—and a challenge to—Christian readers, for his powerful poetry is inseparable from a very carefully thought-out theology that takes very seriously the implications of the often-neglected foundational biblical teaching on the close connection between Christ and creation. At the same time, he provides an even greater challenge to readers who do not share his Christian faith, and who continue to invent ingenious schemes to circumvent or ignore the massive Christian centre to his work. Both of these challenges have been dealt with in a recent important study of Hopkins’s poetry and theology by Bernadette Waterman Ward, called World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Catholic University Press, 2002). Ward’s work is unique among the many works on Hopkins in the rigour with which she engages both Hopkins’s theology (especially the influence of John Newman and John Duns Scotus), and the inability of postmodern literary theory to adequately engage with his work. Ward’s work will be used as a valuable commentary on Hopkins’s thought. We will also be reading a recent work of biographical fiction by Ron Hansen, which serves as an excellent introduction both to Hopkins’s life and work, and to his longest and most difficult poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

Our primary purpose in the seminar will be to understand, appreciate—and delight in—Hopkins's poetry and his thought. Students without a background in theology and literature will be at some disadvantage (and may have to work harder), but such a background is not essential for admission to the seminar. The benefit to you will be a deeper understanding of the God who is “Ground of being, and granite of it,” a restored appreciation for a world that is “charged with the grandeur of God,” and knowledge of some of the most eloquent words ever written about such a Creator, and such a creation.

This course has a maximum enrollment of 12 students.