This season's Our Life in Poetry series begins with a study of poems by the innovative nineteenth century poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’s poems show a richly complex field of concerns. The language of his most explosive lyrics flashes, intemperate, between two charged poles: joy and a desperate lack of joy. He is freed of verbal restraint by the intense concreteness of his notice—both of the given world and of his inner life. The course will be taught by Michael Braziller, publisher of Persea Books, and his guest, poet Marie Ponsot. The following poems will be considered in the discussion of Hopkins: “Pied Beauty,” “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” “That Nature is a Hericlitean Fire,” “No Worst, There is None,” “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord,” and “My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On.”

No prior registration or fee is required. To view the poems, please click on the link below. Please bring a printed copy to the class. Copies of the poems will not be provided at the event.

Hopkins Poems (PDF)
Hopkins Poems (Word)

Marie Ponsot is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching at Queens College, Beijing United University, and Columbia University. Among her awards are an NEA Creative Writing grant, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, and the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. Ponsot's most recent collections are The Bird Catcher, which won the national Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1998, and Springing: New and Selected Poems.