Thursday, November 11, 2010

Giving up Poetry

Today I have been a good girl and have studied nearly all morning (taking a break to eat breakfast.) 
Among other things, I've been reading about Gerard M. Hopkins.  Apparently, he made a list of things to give up for Lent and one of them was poetry.  (He was a poet.)  I find this really rather fascinating.  I get that the point of Lent is to give things up, things you love, but the idea is to give up things you love and aren't necessarily good for you.  For example, playing video games.  Video games aren't bad, but they probably aren't good for you, especially if you are playing them instead of doing other work.  I can't imagine what good reason anyone could come up with for giving up poetry. 

2 comments:

  1. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a natural poet. He experimented with new, creative ways of writing poetry. Dylan Thomas was influenced by him. If you read Dylan Thomas, some of his poems have echoes of Hopkins.

    Hopkins went through a stage of considering giving up poetry altogether. He was a Jesuit Priest and he sometimes felt that writing poetry took him away from his priestly duties.He destroyed some of his early poetry and did give up for a while. However the Father Superior of the Jesuits in England persuaded him that poetry was his God given talent and that he could express his love of God through it. He was persuaded to continue and so he did. Many of his poems are like meditations. They are about getting to the centre of his very being, the central essence of things.

    I love his poetry. I don't always understand it though on a logical level. Sometimes you have to ,"feel," it.You can meditate on phrases and bits of his poems. A bit like Dylan Thomas's poetry at times.

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  2. Hey Tony. Yeah, I did read all about his Jesuit life. And it makes sense that Jesuits would be pro-poetry with that kind of argument because St. Benedict wrote around 1,300 years earlier that people should be grateful for their talents and use them to help God in some way.

    I do really love Dylan's "Do Not Go Gently into that Night."

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