Poetry and prose

A major influence on the poetry of our time. Hopkins is arguably the greatest English poet of the Victorian period, yet his work was unpublished until 1918, twenty-nine years afetr his death. Though in many ways a product of the nineteenth century, he found his audience in the twentieth. His work challenges all easy assumptions as to what the language of poetry can or cannot do, and has been a major influence on modern English verse. Poems in praise of Gods created world such as Pied Beauty, Gods Grandeur and The Windhover, and poems of spiritual struggle sauch as The Wreck of the Deutschland and the sonnets of desolution, have the dramatic power that comes from exploring anew the genius of the English language. The same imaginative power is there also in the prose - the journals, the letters, and the devotional writings. This is a poet who celebrates unique identities and experiences, their meaning and their value.