IS there a poet who has changed your life in ways no other has? Whose work has radically changed the way you see the world, and your understanding of how you can use language to come to terms with it?
For me, there was such a poet: Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Windhover made my heart sing long before I succeeded in unravelling its complex syntax, and my children heard me catch morning's minion on a hundred mornings before they had the faintest idea what a minion was. And it was from Hopkins that I learned to
"...live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet."
And so I rejoiced when I heard last week that Mark Tredinnick and Judith Ngala Crispin had been teaching a new generation of young people how to learn from, and learn to love, GMH.
Then, by coincidence—or through some inscrutable entanglement that leads to things that look like coincidences—two days later I stumbled on something wonderful. In a YouTube video, the former US poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, at the age of ninety-five, recalls the moment he first encountered GMH's work—more than seventy years previously. He talks of how that encounter changed his poetry and his life. You would be hard pressed to find a better way of spending the next five minutes of your life than hearing Kunitz bear witness to the transformative power of fine poetry, and read one of Hopkins's finest poems, God's Grandeur. To do so, click the button below.
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