The Fire that Breaks: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetic Legacies(Clemson University Press w/ LUP)

In terms of literary history, Gerard Manley Hopkins has been difficult to pin down. Many of his concerns-industrialism, religious faith and doubt, science, language-were common among Victorian writers, but he is often championed as a proto-modernist despite that he avoids the self-conscious allusiveness and indirectness that typify much high modernist poetry. It is partly because Hopkins cannot be pigeonholed that his influence remains relevant. The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins's extended influence on the poets and novelist who defined Anglo-American literature throughout the past century.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: “Rash-Fresh, Re-Winded, New-Skein®®d Score”: The Enduring Newness of Gerard Manley Hopkins Daniel Westover 1 “Admire and Do Otherwise”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ivor Gurney R. K. R. Thornton 2 “Such a Mix of Beauty and Horror”: Two Modes of Modernist Response to Hopkins Lesley Higgins 3 Action and Repose: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Influence in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop Ben Howard 4 The One Sane Milkman, I Fear: The Complex, Abiding Influence of Father Hopkins on John Berryman Paul Mariani 5 Seamus Heaney’s Hopkins Richard Rankin Russell 6 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill: A Compound Ghost Catherine Phillips 7 “A Billion Times Told Lovelier”: Reclaiming Hopkins’s Theological Legacy through Geoffrey Hill’s Kenotic Lens Devon Abts 8 “Strange Elation” and a Strange Relation: Gerard Hopkins and Caribbean Poetry Emily Taylor Merriman 9 “Hack and Rack the Growing Green”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ecotheology, and the Poetry of Denise Levertov, Pattiann Rogers, and Martha Silano Lynn Domina 10 “Before the Word and World became Separate”: Hopkins and Charles Wright’s Contemplative Verse Joe Moffett 11 “A Mix of Mineral and Grease”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Contemporary Appalachian Poetry Thomas Alan Holmes 12 Hansen’s Hopkins: The Poet as Postmodern Exile Adrian Grafe 13 An Afterword to My Visit Joseph J. Feeney, SJ Notes Contributors Index

About the Author :
Daniel Westover is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English, East Tennessee State University. William Wright is Writer in Residence, University of Tennessee.

Review :
'A perennial problem in Hopkins scholarship is that the seemingly unending process of explicating his highly idiosyncratic oeuvre has prevented a serious consideration of the formal and thematic continuities between his writings and those of his contemporaries and successors... Consequently, this collection makes a very welcome contribution to the scholarly conversation.' A. J. Nickerson, Review 19