ellauri095.html on line 153: Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges, who with some other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared by Charles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition by William Henry Gardner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).
ellauri095.html on line 167: Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End". Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918). Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's high Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Hopkins never saw Dolben again after the latter's short visit to Oxford during which they met, and any continuation of their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning two years later in June 1867. Hopkins's feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled by that time, but he was nonetheless greatly affected by his death. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben's death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... for many of Hopkins's best poems – impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost beloved and his muse – were the result." Hopkins's relationship with Dolben is explored in the novel The Hopkins Conundrum.
ellauri095.html on line 184: Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins writes: "It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done... no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity." He took time to learn Old English, which became a major influence on his writing. In the same letter to Bridges he calls Old English "a vastly superior thing to what we have now."
ellauri095.html on line 514: Nevertheless, although The Wreck of the Deutschland was a great breakthrough to the vision of God immanent in nature and thus to the sacramentalism that was to be the basis of the great nature poems of the following years, when Hopkins sent the poem to his friend Robert Bridges, Bridges refused to reread it despite Hopkins’s pleas. The poem was also rejected by the Jesuit magazine the Month, primarily because of its new “sprung” rhythm, and many subsequent readers have had difficulty with it as well.
ellauri095.html on line 520: Competition and collaboration between father and son continued even long after Hopkins left home to take his place in the world. In 1879, for instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Bridges, “I enclose some lines by my father called forth by the proposal to fell the trees in Well Walk (where Keats and other interesting people lived) and printed in some local paper.” Two months later Hopkins composed “Binsey Poplars” to commemorate the felling of a grove of trees near Oxford. Clearly, competition with his father was an important creative stimulus.
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