The Mind and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ditchling, Sussex: Pepler & Sewell / St. Dominic's Press, 1935. Limited edition. Octavo (8 3/5 inches tall), beige linen spine, printed tan paper boards, uncut, buff printed dust wrapper. Book fine, owner's ink-stamp, minor tearing and creasing to edges of scarce dust wrapper. A nearly-fine copy. Item #1310
"HIS TECHNIQUE ESTABLISHED A MASTERY, COMPLETE IN ITS KIND, IN USES OF LANGUAGE WITH WHICH MANY POETS ARE NO MORE THAN EXPERIMENTING"
Limited first edition—one of only 300 copies—of this early study of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Printed by St. Dominic's Press and complete as issued in the rare original dust wrapper with a woodcut illustration by Eric Gill. Gill's radiant chalice on the title page is repeated on the dust wrapper
Critical appreciation for Hopkins's genius began to grow after Robert Bridges oversaw the publication of the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1919)—the first collected edition of Hopkins's work. The 1930 second edition loosed a flood of scholarship, including this effort by Kelly, a regular contributor to Blackfriars (the magazine published by the English Dominicans). "In the earlier part of his life, Kelly was for a time infatuated with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and wrote a long essay on it. In his ideas, Hopkins was impeccable: he was both Platonist and Thomist. His poetry, however, was another matter: its forms were innovative and its manner subjective" (William Stoddart, A Scholastic Universalist).
Numbered 116 on the limitation page and dedicated to the noted English Thomist, Father Thomas Gilby, O.P. "The stress accents on the quotations from Hopkins's poetry have been added by hand" (Taylor and Sewell) and the original Errata leaf is tipped in at rear, as issued. Printed as Number 2 in the Stones from a Brook series (noted on the printed flaps and back panel of the wrapper), preceded by Father Vincent McNabb's Geoffrey Chaucer: A Study in Genius and Ethics (1934). Approbations. Taylor and Sewell. Saint Dominic's Press: A Bibliography 1916 - 1937, A246.
Price: $200.00