Pied Beauty | Suggested Reading

Pied Beauty What Do I Read Next?

•  All of Hopkins’s poems, along with extracts from his journals and letters, and some of his sermons and devotional writings, are collected in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (1986), edited by Catherine Phillips. Readers new to his poetry may enjoy “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” and “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” For an example of his so-called terrible sonnets, “No Worst” may be of interest.

•  Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991), by Robert Bernard Martin, is an interesting biography that argues that Hopkins projected his suppressed homoerotic impulses onto God and nature, producing some of the most sensually ecstatic religious poetry in English literature. Martin gained unprecedented and unrestricted access to Hopkins’s notebooks to write this biography.

•  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (2005), by Eugene H. Peterson, is a popular book written for the general reader in which the author explores...
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