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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
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(1844–89) Poet of great originality, virtually unpublished in his lifetime. At Oxford he converted to Roman Catholicism and in 1868 became a *Jesuit. He then burnt his early poems, but the death of five nuns in the Deutschland, a German ship heading for the USA which ran aground off Kent in 1875, prompted him to write in the following year The Wreck of the Deutschland. It was in what he called 'sprung rhythm', a form of his own relying on stress rather than strict metre and having much in common with medieval *alliterative verse. He continued to write in this way, often in short poems expressing an intense experience of nature. The Windhover opens with a glimpse of a kestrel which suggests the style: 'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon'. His collected poems were published in 1918.
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