INTRODUCTION

    Much of Hopkins's historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry; which ran
contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English poetry was
based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on
repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition.
Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he
became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most
famous example. Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm.

    Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four
syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. In reality, it more closely resembles the
"rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional meter. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as
a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become
"same and tame." In this way, Hopkins can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity
with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive
love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.

Language in his poems

    The language of Hopkins’s poems is often striking. His imagery can be simple, as in Heaven-Haven, where the
comparison is between a nun entering a convent and a ship entering a harbour out of a storm. It can be splendidly
metaphysical and intricate, as it is in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, where he leaps from one image to another to show
how each thing expresses its own uniqueness, and how divinity reflects itself through all of them.

    He uses many archaic and dialect words, but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems
from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives,
sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him
steady air. This concentrates his images, communicating the intress of the poet’s perceptions of an inscape to his
reader.
   
    Added richness comes from Hopkins’s extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopeia and rhyme.

    Hopkins was influenced by the Welsh language that he acquired while studying theology at St Beuno's College
near St Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd with its emphasis on repeating
sounds accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work.


This introduction is extract from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins






About the information I collected for all the e-texts:

Title: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Now First Published

Author: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Editor: Robert Bridges Release

Date: August 26, 2007 [EBook #22403]

Language: English




Where did I found it?