Course Description

Though his slim body of work was unknown during his lifetime and continues to present great challenges to contemporary readers, today Gerard Manley Hopkins is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of English poets. In this course, we will survey all of Hopkins’s major poems, beginning with his longest and most difficult, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” We will study and hear his poetry in the context of his life, looking also at his journals, sermons, and devotional writings. Hopkins’s thought is a great resource for Christian readers today, for it explores the often-neglected centrality of Christ in creation. It helps us to see and appreciate the “pied beauty” of a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as well as pointing us to some ways in which we humans can be the “eye, heart, tongue” of creation.