Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life Book

Probably no English poet of the 19th century is today so widely read or greatly loved as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet in his lifetime he was almost entirely unpublished, and only a handful of his close friends knew that he wrote poetry at all. On his death, many of Hopkins' poems, together with most of his other papers, were burned by his fellow Jesuits who did not realize what they had in their midst; and they were to guard closely what remained, until now. Robert Bernard Martin is the first biographer to have had unrestricted access to Hopkins' surviving papers. The result is as complete a biography of this astonishingly immediate poet as we are ever likely to achieve. It is also, in places, revelatory. Martin shows that the homosexuality many have found latent in Hopkins' poetry blossomed in his undergraduate love for a flamboyant friend Digby Dolben. He also shows how, though Hopkins' chaotic psyche needed the structure which life as a Jesuit gave him, the severity of its discipline inevitably constricted his creative faculty, at times almost to the point of strangulation. Despite the obscurity of Hopkins' life, his surviving work marks him as a central figure in English literature.Read More