Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet who spent most of his adult life in Dublin, Ireland. Seamus Heaney was born in a small Northern Irish town in 1939, but has spent most of his adult life in Dublin. Hopkins is one of Heaney’s favorite poets, and there is frequently a great deal of Hopkins in Heaney.
They are both poets intensely interested in language, in the sounds of words and their multiple meanings. Hopkins may seem at first to be difficult, but then he will become wonderful and even easy to read and enjoy. Heaney will at first seem wonderfully simple, but you will quickly discover the richness and depth that make him the best poet writing in English today, and probably—along with Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats—one of the three greatest poets of the 20th century.
Our texts for this hauptseminar will be Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works in the Oxford World’s Classics edition, and for Heaney, we will use the Faber and Faber edition of Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996.
Requirements for the course will be serious, thoughtful reading, class participation, weekly “scribbles,” and a seminar paper. We will talk about subjects for papers in class: they will
be papers on Hopkins’s or Heaney’s poems.
Bert Hornback |
