"Gerard Manley Hopkins Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his concept of sprung rhythm and use of imagery) established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion. Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex (now in Greater London), as the eldest of probably nine children to Manley and Catherine (Smith) Hopkins. He was christened at the Anglican church of St John's, Stratford. His father founded"
"is probably John Donne. Others include George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. John Milton in his ""Comus"" falls into this group. The Metaphysical poets went out of favour in the 18th century but began to be read again in the Victorian era. Donne's reputation was finally fully restored by the approbation of T. S. Eliot in the early 20th century. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, Donne's metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or ""unpoetic"" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For"
"Christianity relying on its miracles to a Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."" Harold Bloom writes that ""Whatever his achievement as a critic of literature, society or religion, his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century. Arnold is, at his best, a very good, but highly derivative poet, unlike Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Swinburne and Rossetti, all of"
"have converted. Prudentius (d. ca. 413), born in Hispania Tarraconensis and a fervent Christian, was thoroughly versed in the poets of the Classical tradition, and transforms their vision of poetry as a monument of immortality into an expression of the poet's quest for eternal life culminating in Christian salvation. Sidonius (d. 486), a native of Lugdunum, was a Roman senator and bishop of Clermont who cultivated a traditional villa lifestyle as he watched the Western empire succumb to barbarian incursions. His poetry and collected letters offer a unique view of life in late Roman Gaul from the perspective of a"
"The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards. A. E. Housman"
"today in at least 19 verified manuscript copies. The poem has passed down from a Latin translation by Bede in his ""Ecclesiastical History of the English People"". It forms a prominent landmark and reference point for the study of Old English prosody, for the early influence which Christianity had on the poems and songs of the Anglo-Saxon people after their conversion. Bede wrote about the poet and his work in his ""Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum"", book 4, chapter 24. According to Bede, Cædmon was an illiterate cow-herder ""who was actually employed by the monastery of Whitby"" and who miraculously was"
"and were reprinted in subsequent editions over the course of the next two centuries. Though the poems were often cast in a suitably Metaphysical style, half were written by fellow clergymen, few of whom are remembered for their poetry. Among those who are were Henry King and Jasper Mayne, who was soon to quit authorship for clerical orders. Bishop Richard Corbet's poetry writing was also nearly over by now and he contributed only a humorous squib. Other churchmen included Henry Valentine (fl 1600-50), Edward Hyde (1607-59) and Richard Busby. Two poets, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Thomas Carew, who"
"John Donne John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday"
"work stems from an anti-Catholic sentiment in English letters—especially among critics who claim that his verse suffered as a result of his religious conversion. Conversely, the Protestant poet Abraham Cowley memorialised Crashaw in an elegy expresses a conciliatory opinion of Crashaw's Catholic character"" Today, Crashaw's work is largely unknown and unread— if he is not the ""most important"" he is certainly one of the most distinguished of the metaphysical poets. Crashaw's poetry has inspired or directly influenced the work of many poets in his own day, and throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. According to literary scholars Lorraine Roberts"
"contemporaries in knowledge and wisdom, and in high scholarship, piety, namely the angelic and noble Eoin Mac Sleighne, the soft-spoken, gentle bishop of Cork in Munster of Colman's Cloyne and of RosCarberry, who was imprisoned in the city of Cork""'. O'Colmain had been parish priest of Glounthane, St. Finbarrs and Knockraha parishes, who was well read in classical and scriptural literature. Another poet, writer and scholar, Conchúir Ó Corbáin, schoolmaster from Glanmire, thanked Sleyne for reviving the spirit of poetry and for his goodness which placed poets and writers forever in his debt. He wrote that """"faith and culture were"
"was on terms of friendship with Alexander Barclay. There is a portrait of him in the Royal MS. 17 D. iii. He is represented as a young man in a priest's gown, and with long flowing hair not tonsured. In 1548 he dedicated his version of the treatise ""De regimine Principum"" to the Duke of Somerset, and also in 1551 his paraphrase of some of the Psalms. In 1558 Forrest presented to Queen Mary his poem of ‘The Second Gresyld.’ His poetical works are: William Forrest (poet) William Forrest (fl. 1581) was an English Catholic priest and poet. Forrest is"
"Puritan poets Puritanism, begun in England in the 17th century, was a radical Protestant movement to reform the Church of England. The idea of a Puritan poet may seem a bit of a contradiction as Puritans disagreed with the practice of using metaphor and verbal flourishes in speech and writing. The Puritan movement was one for very literal expression and teaching. But, over time, some room for creative expression arose and Puritan poets such as John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor and John Dryden produced some of the greatest verse of their age. The poet in puritan age :- John"
"Field; with a taste of the variety of other Poems left by Sir John Beaumont"". No more tastes were ever vouchsafed, so Beaumont's reputation rests on this the juvenile ""Metamorphosis of Tobacco"". Beaumont's favoured medium was the heroic couplet. Bosworth Field, the scene of the battle described in Beaumont's principal poem, lay close to the poet's residence of Grace-Dieu. He always wrote with a remarkable smoothness, which marks him, with Edmund Waller and George Sandys, as one of the pioneers of the classic reformation of English verse. The poems of Sir John Beaumont were included in Alexander Chalmers's ""English Poets"","
"was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively, to the point where his efforts at self-editing were described by his contemporary Robert Browning as ""insane"", symptomatic of ""mental infirmity"". His complex compositional practice and frequent redrafting also demonstrates a dynamic relationship between images and text, as can be seen in the many notebooks he worked in. Few poets have used such a variety of styles with such an exact understanding of metre; like many Victorian poets, he experimented in adapting the quantitative metres of Greek and Latin poetry to English. He reflects the Victorian period of his maturity"
"religious poetry anthologies. Edited by John Fuller. The poets included were: Thomas Wyatt - Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey - Giles Fletcher - Edmund Spenser - Walter Ralegh - Fulke Greville - Philip Sidney - Arthur Gorges - George Chapman - Henry Constable - Samuel Daniel - Michael Drayton - Joshua Sylvester - William Shakespeare - John Davies of Hereford - Thomas Campion - William Alabaster - Barnabe Barnes - John Davies - John Donne - Richard Barnfield - Lord Herbert of Cherbury - William Drummond - Mary Wroth - William Browne - George Herbert - Thomas Carew - William"
"exemplified in the troubadour poetry of Provençal, is seen as a significant influence on Dafydd's poetry. He was an innovative poet who was responsible for popularising the metre known as the ""cywydd"" and first to use it for praise. But perhaps his greatest innovation was to make himself the main focus of his poetry. By its very nature, most of the work of the traditional Welsh court poets kept their own personalities far from their poetry, the primary purpose of which was to sing the praises of their patrons. Dafydd's work, by contrast is full of his own feelings and"
"of the hyper-sensitive genius killed by high feeling, which Shelley later portrayed. The Victorian sense of poetry as the work of indulgence and luxuriant fancy offered a schema into which Keats was posthumously fitted. Marked as the standard-bearer of sensory writing, his reputation grew steadily and remarkably. His work had the full support of the influential Cambridge Apostles, whose members included the young Tennyson, later a popular Poet Laureate who came to regard Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th century. Constance Naden was a great admirer of his poems, arguing that his genius lay in his 'exquisite sensitiveness"
"the early 17th century included the Metaphysical poets: John Donne (1572–1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. Their style was characterized by wit and metaphysical conceits, that is far-fetched or unusual similes or metaphors. The most important prose work of the early 17th century was the King James Bible. This, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. This represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale, and it"
"the press. His desire for freedom extended into his style: he introduced new words (coined from Latin) to the English language, and was the first modern writer to employ non-rhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations. William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the ""greatest English author"", and he remains generally regarded ""as one of the preeminent writers in the English language"", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised ""Paradise Lost"" as ""a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to"
"of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Though not a modernist, Hardy was an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th century. A major novelist of the late 19th century, Hardy, after the adverse criticism of his last novel, ""Jude the Obscure"", concentrated on publishing poetry. On the other hand, another significant transitional figure between Victorians and modernists, the late-19th-century novelist, Henry James (1843–1916), continued to publish major works into the 20th century. James, born in the US, lived in Europe from 1875, and became a British citizen in 1915. Another immigrant,"
"an increasing body of admirers ""of late years"". This will save him from ""becoming the God of his own idolatry!"" The 20th-century critic Christopher Salvesen notes that Hazlitt's observation in ""The Spirit of the Age"" that Wordsworth's poetry is ""synthetic"" characterises it best, and Roy Park in an extensive study expresses the view that Hazlitt, as the poet's contemporary, most completely understood the essence of his poetry as a significant component of the ""spirit of the age"". Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), widely admired as one of the most learned men in Europe, was a Scottish lawyer, legislator, educator, philosopher, historian,"
"When his conversion became known, it was ""an understandable choice to those around him"" given his intellectual convictions, and that ""he could not have done anything less than seek what he regarded as the most ancient, most sacramental, and highest expression of the Christian faith that forms the indisputable basis for the culture and civilization of modern Europe"". Eliot's conversion and his adherence to Anglo-Catholicism informed and influenced his later poetry. Critical reviews of Eliot's poems shifted as well, with some critics asserting that Eliot's work suffered with the addition of Christian themes. One critic, Morton Zabel said that this"
"The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important. Important literary precursors of modernism, were: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) ( Walt Whitman (1819–1892); Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867); Rimbaud (1854–1891); August Strindberg (1849–1912). A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the twentieth-century was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Though not a modernist, Hardy was an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the twentieth-century. A major novelist of the late nineteenth-century, Hardy lived well into the third decade of the twentieth-century, though he only published poetry in this period. Another significant transitional figure between Victorians and modernists, the"
"John Wycliffe John Wycliffe (; also spelled ""Wyclif"", ""Wycliff"", ""Wiclef"", ""Wicliffe"", ""Wickliffe""; 1320s – 31 December 1384), an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, Biblical translator, reformer, English priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford, became an influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism. Wycliffe attacked the privileged status of the clergy, which bolstered their powerful role in England. He then attacked the luxury and pomp of local parishes and their ceremonies. Wycliffe also advocated translation of the Bible into the vernacular. In 1382 he completed a"
"Although natural wonders are celebrated in the Psalms and the Book of Job, wilderness portrayals in art became more prevalent in the 1800s, especially in the works of the Romantic movement. British artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. Before that, paintings had been primarily of religious scenes or of human beings. William Wordsworth's poetry described the wonder of the natural world, which had formerly been viewed as a threatening place. Increasingly the valuing of nature became an aspect of Western culture. This artistic movement"
"speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Despite"
"voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece ""On the Death of the Righteous"", based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's "" I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne"" (2015). John Donne John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and"
"English literature ""English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"" to be a continuance of Pope's tradition), William Wordsworth found Pope's style fundamentally too decadent a representation of the human condition. George Gilfillan in his study of 1856 described Pope's talent as 'a rose peering into the summer air, fine, rather than powerful. In the 20th century Pope's reputation was revived. Pope's work was, of course, full of references to the people and places of his time, and these aided people's understanding of the past. The postwar period stressed the power of Pope's poetry, recognising that Pope's immersion in Christian and Biblical culture"
"William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form ""what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language"". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him ""far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced"". In 2002, Blake was"
"Thompson's (1700–48), most famous for the nature poetry of his ""Seasons"". The eighteenth century was also a period of innovation in Gaelic vernacular poetry. Major figures included the satirist Rob Donn Mackay (Robert Mackay, 1714–78), the hunter-poet Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (Duncan Ban MacIntyre, 1724–1812) and Uillean Ross (William Ross, 1762–90), most noted for his anguished love songs. The most significant figure in the tradition was Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alasdair MacDonald, c. 1698–1770), who emerged as the nationalist poet of the Jacobite cause and whose poetry marks a shift away from the clan-based panegyric tradition. His interest in"
"became the standard Bible of the Church of England. The Metaphysical poets John Donne (1572–1631) and George Herbert (1593–1633) were still alive after 1625, and later in the 17th century a second generation of metaphysical poets were writing, including Richard Crashaw (1613–1649), Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637–1674) and Henry Vaughan (1622–1695). The Cavalier poets were another important group of 17th-century poets, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War (1642–51). (King Charles reigned from 1625 and was executed 1649). The best known of the Cavalier poets are Robert Herrick, Richard"
"in poetry, Marian hymns, and Carols, e.g., in the 17th-century poems of John Donne and George Herbert, or in the 18th-century works of Thomas Ken such as ""Saint Mary the Virgin"". Anglican devotion for the Virgin Mary was revived during the 19th century Oxford Movement of Anglo-Catholicism and by the activities of prominent figures such as John Henry Newman. British theologians such as Father Frederick Faber (who composed several hymns to Mary) took an enthusiastic approach to the promotion of Marian devotions towards the end of the 19th century. In the liturgical renewal of the 20th century, Mary gained new"
"The topic of these poems places them within a genre of Christian literature popular during the 17th century and places Milton alongside of poets like John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert. However, Milton's poetry reflects the origins of his anti-William Laud and anti-Church of England based religious beliefs. The poem deals with both the Nativity and the Incarnation of Christ and Milton believed that the two were connected. The Nativity and the Crucifixion represent Christ's purpose as Christ in Milton's poetry, and contemporary poem, because Christ becomes human-like in the Nativity to redeem fallen man and humanity is redeemed"