The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.