Gerard Manley Hopkins
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2019
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest who at times burned his poems and at others insisted they should not be published. His main themes are how he, nature and God relate to each other. His friend Robert Bridges preserved Hopkins' poetry and, once printed in 1918, works such as The Windhover, Pied Beauty and As Kingfishers Catch Fire were celebrated for their inventiveness and he was seen as a major poet, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian age.
With
Catherine Phillips R J Owens Fellow in English at Downing College, University of Cambridge
Jane Wright Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol
and
Martin Dubois Assistant Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature at Durham University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:07.5 | There's a reading list to go with it on our website, |
| 0:09.6 | and you can get news about our programs |
| 0:11.5 | if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. |
| 0:14.9 | I hope you enjoyed the programs. |
| 0:16.5 | Hello, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 to 1889, |
| 0:20.1 | has been called the greatest Victorian poet |
| 0:22.6 | for his vivid imagery and his innovation with work |
| 0:25.3 | such as the Windhover, Pied Beauty, |
| 0:27.4 | and as Kingfisher's Catch Fire. |
| 0:30.2 | It was a Jesuit priest and his poems |
| 0:32.0 | explore how he, nature, and God relate to each other, |
| 0:35.4 | and what happens when those relationships are strained. |
| 0:38.8 | He either couldn't or wouldn't have them published though. |
| 0:41.5 | We know of them thanks to a friend who became the poet, |
| 0:43.8 | Laureate, and who revealed them 30 years after Hopkins' death |
| 0:47.3 | in the age not of tennis and browning, |
| 0:49.4 | but of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. |
| 0:52.5 | We'd meet a disgust Gerard Manley Hopkins are, |
| 0:55.0 | Catherine Phillips, the RJ Owens fellow |
| 0:57.2 | in English at Downing College University of Cambridge, |
... |
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