Hopkins, Gerard Manley | Desmond Egan (essay date 1994)
Desmond Egan (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Hopkins' Influence on Poetry," in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, edited by Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes, Garland Publishing, 1994, pp. 59-93.
[Egan is an Irish poet, critic, and the founder of the Hopkins Society in Ireland. In the following essay, he summarizes Hopkins's influence on several major poets.]
When we compare the lines from Tennyson's "Requiescat" (pub. 1842):
Fair is her cottage in its place
Where yon broad water sweetly slowly glides
It sees itself from thatch to base
Dream in the sliding tides.
with these of Spender's poem "Rough" (c. 1930):
My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes.
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.
—we can...
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