Talk:Gerard Manley Hopkins

message: I have restored "Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest" to its earlier form (without the "Fr." or the "S.J").  This recent change is redundant for those "in the know" and obscure for those not "in the know".  It literally means:  "[The priest] Gerard Manley Hopkins, [of the Jesuits] (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest".  Another alternative is for the sentence to read  "Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet", though this would probably be less agreeable to those wishing to accentuate his role as a Roman Catholic clergyman, since it suggests that his only memorable role is as a poet, which I would certainly suggest is more accurate ... No one would be making a Wikipedia entry for "Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J." were he not "Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet" (he is certainly not his friend Cardinal Newman!).  (Welland_R) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Welland R (talk • contribs) 19:20, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Name in introductory sentence

message: Did Hopkins ever do any translations? I wondering in particular if he did a translation of François Mauriac's Therese (a translation from french). Johnny Panic 12:37, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never heard of him doing any major translations but the Gerard Hopkins who has several French translations on amazon is, I think, his nephew. MeltBanana 19:38, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: GMH could hardly have translated Mauriac's Thérèse stories, since he died before they were written. However, I have a Penguin edition of Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, "Thérèse chez le docteur", "Thérèse a l'hôtel" and La Fin de la nuit, collected together under the title Thérèse which are indeed translated by a Gerard Hopkins, so I guess that's where the confusion comes from. --Camembert 16:29, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: translations

message: I don't know anything about this person, but from this:
:Though he suffered from what today might be diagnosed as manic depression, and battled a deep sense of anguish throughout his life, upon his death bed, he evidently overcame some of his feelings of despondency, at times stygian in their intensity. His last words were "I am so happy, I am so happy."
...his last words sound more like those of a person in the manic phase of manic-depression (which should probably be changed to bipolar disorder, I think) than one who has recovered from that illness. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.53.48.207 (talk) 00:26, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm on their own I think it might be more that those last words could mean anything or nothing. They could indeed mean he was in a mania. However they could also mean he was just disoriented from dying or that he was experiencing a kind of "neurochemical rush" that I've heard occurs in some dying people or it could represent a hope of a beneficial afterlife or something else entirely. I'm a bit skeptical of putting too much weight in last words. Although I suppose it's plausible his loved ones hoped "I'm so happy" meant that his depression was lifted and that it was just nice he died happy.--T. Anthony 04:52, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Last words 

message: "After suffering ill health for several years and bouts of diarrhea, Hopkins died of venereal disease in 1889" 
This is factually incorrect. Hopkins died of Typhoid Fever. This is well documented, and there is consensus on the issue. Additionally, Typhoid fever is NOT a venereal disease, and there is consensus on that as well. 70.165.103.148 03:24, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blatant Error 

message: There is really entirely too much emphasis in this article on Hopkins's supposedly homosexual tendencies.  While there has been considerable speculation in the past about his relationship with Digby Dolben, much of the most recent scholarship has noted that the Victorian period was a time of close male-male friendships; and in any case, that we only have two poems to which the relationship bears any possible direct relation, and furthermore, that even these have been interpreted in alternate ways.  Thus, the relationship may warrant being noted, but there certainly shouldn't be a whole section devoted to his supposed "erotic influences," as if Hopkins love of God were simply somehow a sublimation of his own unfulfilled desire.  Shouldn't that be an end of the LGTB movement, that it may be accepted as normal for a man to have some sort of passionate attachment to another man, and not be inordinately set aside somehow for it?  No doubt this whole discussion would have been very painful for Hopkins; why draw more attention to it than is warranted? (138.16.28.233 19:13, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a lot of very extensive research on Hopkins' sexuality as it informs one's understanding of his greatest passion, his faith. Indeed, in many poems, these are inexorably linked. Michael Lynch made his claim to fame when he proposed that Hopkins was a "fully gay poet" ("Recovering Hopkins, Recovering Ourselves", The Hopkins Quarterly) which has created this massive cultural and academic interest in the subject. For example, Dennis Sobolev very rigorously investigates the homoeritic readings of Hopkins in "Hopkins' "Bellbright Biodies": The Dialectics of Desire in His Writing", as well as "Semantic Counterpoint and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins" (to a lesser extent). Joseph Bristow in ""Churlsgrace": Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body" similarly pinpoints what appears to be a fascination with the Harry Ploughman figure, and similar men, in his work, and even in his sermons! Clearly there is a perceived homoeroticism in his renderings of the Lord, and that is interesting to critics whatever Hopkins' sexuality was. Michael Kaylor's "Whitmanesque reading of Hopkins' "Epithalamanioon"" famously makes a great comparison of their styles, and how their sexualities play roles in defining their art form; Hopkins himself was something of a conflicted fan of Whitman. James W. Earl, Austin Warren, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, which aren't really mentioned in the article (for example, she reads "The Wreck of the Deustchland" as a heterosexual rape fantasy, and begins Madwoman in the Attic with the claim "Is the pen a metaphorical penis? Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to have thought so.") ~ZytheTalk to me! 15:52, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I do think the section is meaninglessly long. This is supposed to be a summary of Hopkins, not a summary of his sexuality, whatever it may be. We can't speculate here. Other writers may, but we must provide the sources and not speculate on our own sides of this. If someone sees him as homoerotic, that's fine, if someone sees that as overthinking it, that's fine, we need not explain this in such detail. 74.5.111.155 (talk) 16:44, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

text: "No real evidence"? What about his constant (and I do mean constant)personal and private journal entires castigating himself for looking at attractive (usually working class, but not exclusively so) men and adolescents, and the 'danger' of his male friendships - worldliness, yes, but it is clear to anyone who reads them that sex is in the mix too. Poetry can be misinterpreted: a man's words to himself can't.  Hopkins was gay (in orientation if not in practice; it is possible to have desires and not act on them), and the fact that you don't like it suggests that you have a bit of an axe to grind yourself. Afraid that it diminishes him? It doesn't. He was a great poet AND he fancied men. What's the problem? 86.140.19.234 (talk) 13:16, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem might be put this way: Hopkins once confided to his journal that his feelings for a friend's fiancée (who was female - people of the same sex didn't marry in those days) were stronger than was strictly in keeping with either propriety or friendship. He went straight to his confessor and asked for help. He couldn't handle such strong feelings for a woman alone. That would make him what, exactly? Are large conclusions to be drawn from that, or would it be special pleading to draw anything from it at all? I think it might be the latter, if you see the analogy.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fixlein (talk • contribs) 15:40, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

text: As Hopkins wrote in a well known letter, “I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me more desirous to read him and more determined I will not.” David Couch (talk) 19:05, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Homoeroticism re-examined 

message: Recently the file :File:Alfred William Garrett; William Alexander Comyn Macfarlane; Gerard Manley Hopkins by Thomas C. Bayfield.jpg (right) was uploaded and it appears to be relevant to this article and not currently used by it (Hopkins is the guy on the right). If you're interested and think it would be a useful addition, please feel free to include it. Dcoetzee 01:32, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  New file [[:File:Alfred William Garrett; William Alexander Comyn Macfarlane; Gerard Manley Hopkins by Thomas C. Bayfield.jpg]] 

message: I recommend splitting the Life section into two - his time as a student and his time after this. It would make it easier to access. 
And I agree that to have such a large section on eroticism in this article is to suggest it's much more of a theme of Hopkins than it is. It has become like the anti-semitism sections in other wiki-biographies which take up half the article because it is contraversial. Waving a large flag, even a great flag, is not what encylopedias are for. Spanglej (talk) 21:32, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:   "Life" and eroticism 

message: W. H. Gardner's book says Stratford, Essex.  So does Catherine Phillips's book.  So does EB Ultimate Reference Suite 2012.  We have to stick to the sources, I think.  If your source says different, please tell us what it is.   --Kenatipo  speak! 23:16, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where is Stratford? 

message: Gerard Manley Hopkins was the "the eldest of nine children in the High Anglican, artistically minded horne of Kate and Manley Hopkins." says the "The Oxford Companion to English Literature" Yet, it mentioned in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography • Volume Fifty-seven Victorian Prose Writers After 1867" that "He was the eldest of their eight children who survived childhood." Thus, this leads to the fact the one of his siblings died at a certain point in time. I'm going to include this info about Hopkins.
::It is noted in the article text that various different sources give differing numbers of siblings. The Dictionary of Literary Biography and ODNB might give different detail on the siblings. Stillbirths, abortions, adoptions and infant deaths are sometimes included, sometimes not. Records are often not accurate in this area, especially in the 19th Century and before. We need more sourced detail on this. Thanks Span (talk) 11:20, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Siblings

message: Something's wrong with it! --Matt723star (talk) 01:57, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Article picture

message: In the section: "Oxford and the priesthood", we read, "Hopkins was an unusually sensitive and shy student and poet............................Hopkins began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet".
So was he "unusually sensitive and shy" or "a keen socialite"? Was he a "shy" poet or a "prolific" one? Can anyone reconcile these ideas in the references? Maybe he began  as a keen socialite but became sensitive and shy later on, perhaps as the result of the conflict between his emerging sexuality and his religious convictions. It cannot be resolved without access to the sources but I think it needs doing. It's not good for the article to state two opposites so firmly. Budhen (talk) 20:31, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shyness 

message: He began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet, but he seemed to have alarmed himself with the changes in his behaviour that resulted.
:This tells us nothing. Valetude (talk) 14:10, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes in his behaviour? 

message: Reference 19 links to a book by the FDA, i.e. link is corrupted- poor referencing and was never archived. I could not find out which editor made this edit, but as it stands the sentence about Hopkins being bipolar isnt backed up by a source. Wuerzele (talk) 09:46, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Corrupted reference 19 ( linking to FDA) 

message: "in which 157 people died"  This looks like a typo.  Historic England speaks of "the loss of about 57 passengers"  (https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/womens-history/maritime-women/wreck-deutschland/)  157 certainly does not add up, given the (admittedly incomplete) account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Deutschland_(1866).  Andy Denis 14:29, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typo?