Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry and Theology

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Gerard Manley Hopkins has a strong case for being the greatest Roman Catholic poet after Dante. He is certainly among the greatest among those who have written in English. This class introduces students to Hopkins’s greatest poems and theological essays, his education at Oxford, his formation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and his relationship to theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Bl. John Duns Scotus, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Supplementary readings will include the nineteenth-century Anglican and Catholic divines that influenced Hopkins, such as H. P. Liddon, Benjamin Jowett, Frederick William Faber, and St. John Henry Newman (among others).