The Fire That Breaks

The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins’s continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers—including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Gurney, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Charles Wright, Maurice Manning, and Ron Hansen—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, modern novelists, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world’s leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the collection examines both known and unexpected affinities. The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.