
The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Volume VIII: The Poems
Catherine Phillips(Editor)
Oxford University Press
Will be published approx. on 10. December 2026
Book
Hardback
816 pages
978-0-19-953403-6 (ISBN)
Description
The eighth and final volume of the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins invites researchers to find new possibilities of understanding and interpretation. It presents not a 'final text' but performance texts, the recording of how Hopkins's understanding of what he was trying to say evolved as he worked on his poems, similarly to the way in which, over the years, a professional musician changes aspects of how they play particular pieces. Hopkins's varying attempts to indicate how he was hearing each poem acts as a guiding principle in Catherine Phillips's selection of copy text; the evolution of each line is carefully traced in the complete extant variants listed. This approach calls for an assessment of the constraints on how freely Hopkins could guide the reader/hearer of his mature poems, and leads to an examination of the history of each of the major manuscript collections.
This edition of the poems divides Hopkins's brief creative life into five chronological periods, each of which is given a preface, sketching out his early years, his Jesuit training, professional work, and his final days as a Professor of Greek and Latin in Dublin. His principal statements about rhythm and rhyme, inscape and instress, are introduced at the points at which they indicate his developing ideas, and the annotation draws on the preceding seven volumes of the Collected Works, in which other aspects of Hopkins's life that shaped his poems are presented within their special contexts. This volume additionally alludes to two significant contributions to poetic meaning: Hopkins's interest in contemporary etymological studies, and details of the birds, insects, flowers, and trees that he described, often ambiguously.
This edition of the poems divides Hopkins's brief creative life into five chronological periods, each of which is given a preface, sketching out his early years, his Jesuit training, professional work, and his final days as a Professor of Greek and Latin in Dublin. His principal statements about rhythm and rhyme, inscape and instress, are introduced at the points at which they indicate his developing ideas, and the annotation draws on the preceding seven volumes of the Collected Works, in which other aspects of Hopkins's life that shaped his poems are presented within their special contexts. This volume additionally alludes to two significant contributions to poetic meaning: Hopkins's interest in contemporary etymological studies, and details of the birds, insects, flowers, and trees that he described, often ambiguously.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
6 black-and-white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-19-953403-6 (9780199534036)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Catherine Phillips is a Fellow Emerita of Downing College, Cambridge, where she was Director of Studies in English and a Tutor. She works largely on nineteenth-century writers and has a special interest in poetry and its relation to the fine arts. She has produced a number of editions and studies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a biography of Robert Bridges (OUP, 1992), and research on other nineteenth and twentieth-century writers such as Tennyson, Yeats, and Geoffrey Hill.
Content
Introduction The Manuscripts and Editing Principles Biographical Register Part I: 1844-1868 Part II: 1868-1873 Part III : 1873-1877 Part IV: 1877 -1883 Part V: 1884-1889 Appendices: A. Christina Rossetti, 'The Convent Threshold' B. Brothers MS D1