I created this website for pedagogical and research purposes. My main goal is to provide a platform for teaching Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry to undergraduate students, as well as to offer a space where students can experiment with the poems’ meter, scansion, and sound.
The site’s main focus at the moment is the poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, but my hope is to eventually expand it to include other poems by Hopkins as well as other related authors, such as Hopkins’ close friend and posthumous editor Robert Bridges, or influential predecessors like Christina Rossetti or Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The site is divided into three main sections: the exhibits, the lab, the archive.
The Exhibits
The main purpose of the exhibits is to offer context on the poet and his poetical production. These exhibits are not intended to be all-inclusive sources on the poet and his background, but rather to function as a starting point and to offer users further avenues of research. Thus, the exhibits provide brief accounts and succinct backgrounds, as well as a variety of links and miscellaneous materials which the students can explore at their own convenience and according to their own interests.
- The exhibit Gerard Manley Hopkins provides information on the poet’s background: his life, family, education, college years, friends and religious faith—all of which contributed to and influenced Hopkins’ poetical production.
- In The SS Deutschland the user will find miscellaneous material related to the sinking of the German steamship SS Deutschland on December 1875. The tragic events, narrated in the newspaper articles included in this section, inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to compose his first poem in years, The Wreck of the Deutschland.
- Poems contains material regarding the textual history of Hopkins’ poems, as well as different versions of The Wreck of the Deutschland, and information on Hopkins’ use of prosody.
The Lab
Prosody is an intricate and complicated matter that may seem daunting to some. Furthermore, Hopkins’ innovative and masterful use of it makes scanning and reading his poems a challenging proposition. The purpose of this lab, is to offer tools and examples that will help the users learn about prosody – or become more proficient at it if they already know the basics. The lab is divided into four main sections:
- Scansion contains tools to scan poems. The goal is to offer resources where students can learn and practice scansion, and where those who are already knowledgeable on scansion can become more proficient at it.
- The Visualization section offers examples of visualization tools and practices that can help users experiment with them at different levels of expertise and sophistication.
- In Annotation the user will find links and examples of text annotation platforms that can be of help in understanding the meaning behind a poem.
- Finally, the Sound Lab is designed to provide users with tools, examples, information, and material that will help them understand and experiment with the intricacies of poetic recitation.
The Archive
The Archive is a repository of all the material included in this site, from pictures and portraits to pdf files, newspaper articles, sound recordings, and variant versions of poems. In the Archive, users can browse items at random or search for specific objects.
By providing access to the miscellaneous material included in this website under a common collection users will be able to access the website’s content thorough an alternative path, one that is not as constrained by the mediation of the curatorial narrative that guides and structures the rest of the exhibitions.
Blanca Santonja