Spring and Fall Resources

This is a journal of articles on Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's like a scholarly fan club, which is just about as nerdy as it gets. In a good way.

The Victorian Web is a useful website for anyone studying the Victorian period. They have links to biographies, scholarly articles, historical context material, and more. Here's a link to their page on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Poets.org has a handy, short bio of our favorite Jesuit-priest-turned-poet.

The Poetry Foundation is an awesome resource. They've got excerpts of some of Hopkins's letters online. It's like reading over his shoulder, only less creepy and annoying!

This is part 1 in a series about the life of Hopkins.

Who knew they had YouTube in the nineteenth century?

From Archive.org.

We might not know how Hopkins would have set this poem to music, but the singer Natalie Merchant gave it a shot and did a pretty awesome job. Give it a listen.

Here's another cool vocal interpretation of the poem.

Poor Hopkins died at a relatively young age. Here's a picture of him taken in 1888, soon before he died of typhoid fever—one of the more popular fevers to die of during the Victorian period.

Here's what Hopkins looked like as a very young man. Looks like a guy who's destined for great things. We've seen faces like this at the local coffee shop…

This is an article that compares Hopkins's poetry (and "Spring and Fall" in particular) to poems by other 19th-century poets.

Two professor types wrote an article on Hopkins's special meter, which he called "sprung rhythm."

This 2008 biography of Hopkins was written by Paul L. Mariani. You can preview it here on Google Books, or you can check it out from your local library.

This is a collection of now-famous essays by critics like F.R. Leavis on Gerard Manley Hopkins. You can preview the book here, or request the book (or individual essays from it) at your local library.