From Michael Dirda’s Washington Post review of a new biography of the Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, written by Paul Mariani:
“There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani’s possesses three great strengths: 1) Mariani has lived with Hopkins’s poetry his entire life, ever since writing a commentary on the poems as his first book; 2) over the past 40 years, he has produced biographies of American poets who might be loosely viewed as the “sons of Gerard”: Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and Robert Lowell; and 3) Mariani is a believing Catholic, with consequent sympathy and insight into Hopkins’s religious convictions and experiences. In several ways, then, this is a spiritual biography, intensely focused on the poet’s inner life, coupled with close analyses of his major poems.”
Sounds like a fascinating biography of one of the most fascinating writers of the Victorian era. (By the way, Hopkins was the subject of Ron Hansen’s most recent novel, Exiles.)
Click here for the full review.
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