Product Description: This book was ready to go to press when Norman MacKenzie died on March 1, 2004. Growing out of the Martin D'Arcy Lectures that he delivered at Oxford in 1988-89, it combines his love of research into the contexts out of which Hopkins's poems were written with his deep knowledge of the poems through the various stages of their composition...read more

Product Description: Norman MacKenzie accurately described the writings of the poet Hopkins in topographic terms as "Hopkins Country." This concept has profound implications for anyone who is trying to understand the poems which present every reader with challenges of reference to local and international events, autobiography, religious belief, trades, agriculture, philosophy, theology, aesthetics, culture-the actual list is much longer...read more