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Title: Mine Own Familiar Friend

Mine Own Familiar Friend

The Relationship between Gerard Hopkins and Robert Bridges

by William Adamson (Author)
©2021 Prompt XX, 138 Pages
English Studies

Summary

Mine Own Familiar Friend adds a new dimension to Hopkins Studies through its exploration of the complex and sometimes confounding friendship between the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Hopkins and the editor of his first collected works, the poet and critic Robert Bridges. The divide between the two men is evident in almost every sphere of their lives, in their approach to poetry, reading, criticism and language. Based upon the primary texts of the letters, poetry and critical writings of the two men, the book is aimed at both an academic and a more generalist audience: Hopkins scholars and those readers of Hopkins’s poetry who may want to know more about this unique modernist poet whose collected works were only published, thanks to Bridges, some twenty-nine years after his death.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Illustrations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 An Odd Couple: Gerard Hopkins and Robert Bridges
  • Chapter 2 The Man from Petrograd: Bridges and Hopkins’s Collected Poems of 1918
  • Chapter 3 With a Friend Like that … : Robert Bridges’s “Preface to Notes” in Hopkins’s Poems, 1918
  • Chapter 4 “Lagging Lines”: Gerard Hopkins’s “To R.B.”
  • Chapter 5 “Upon the Yellow Sands”: Bridges’s Prefatory Sonnet
  • Chapter 6 Critical Minds: The Literary Criticism of Hopkins and Bridges
  • Chapter 7 “Presumptious Jugglery”: Hopkins’s and Bridges’s Critical Views on Each Other’s Works
  • Chapter 8 “The Limits of My World”: Two Approaches to Language
  • Chapter 9 Grig and Grumble: Conclusion
  • A Brief Chronology of Hopkins’s Life
  • A Brief Chronology of Bridges’s Life
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Series index

Illustrations

1. Photograph of Gerard Hopkins page 69: courtesy of Claire Munday and family

2. Photograph of Robert Bridges page 109: ©National Portrait Gallery, London

Preface

My closer interest in the relationship between Gerard Hopkins and Robert Bridges was first sparked at the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Literary Festival in Newbridge, Kildare.1 There had been a discussion on the publication of the first edition of Hopkins’s collected poems edited by Robert Bridges in 1918, some eighteen years after Hopkins’s death, and the crucial question was why, if, as is generally assumed, Bridges was Hopkins’s greatest friend and confident, he had waited such a seemingly inordinate length of time before bringing the assembled poetry that had been entrusted to him to the attention of the literary world? It seemed neither defensible nor fair.

So began my journey into the world of Hopkins and Bridges and the anomalous and often incomprehensible relationship between the two men that was conducted largely through letters, of which only those of Hopkins for the most part exist, Bridges having destroyed those he wrote to Hopkins soon after he took possession of his friend’s literary estate from the Jesuits in Dublin.

Details

Pages
XX, 138
Publication Year
2021
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781800794856
ISBN (PDF)
9781800794863
ISBN (ePUB)
9781800794870
ISBN (MOBI)
9781800794887
DOI
10.3726/b18389
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (July)
Keywords
Relationship between Gerard Hopkins and Robert Bridges Hopkins Studies critical writings
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2021. XX, 138 pp., 2 fig. b/w.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

William Adamson (Author)

William Robert Adamson has both authored and edited books and articles on subjects as diverse as the 18th century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett, the American crime writer Raymond Chandler, film studies and language skills for university students of English. He is Head of the English Department at the University of Ulm in Germany where he specialises in poetry and creative writing. He is the Assistant Director of the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society of Newbridge, Ireland, and is also a past president of the Raymond Chandler Society, Germany. In 2007 he was the recipient of Recipient of the O’Connor Cup presented by the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society.

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Title: Mine Own Familiar Friend