Oxford University

A lecture by Prof. Michael Hurley (Cambridge University)

Monday, March 3rd

7:30 PM

Blackfriars (OX1 3LY)

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Abstract: An eccentric and obscure Victorian priest, unremarkable by any worldly measure, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) taught himself to make words sing, and bite, and cry out as no writer before him, or any writer since. This lecture will survey his remarkable achievement as a poet with an emphasis on how his poetics was informed by his religious faith: how, through the writing of poetry, he sought to express but also to explore, understand, and reconcile the fierce extremes of his spiritual experience and temper, swinging between ecstasy and despair; how no one would publish him in his lifetime – "dared not", he once quipped to this mother – but how, some thirty years after his death, his poems suddenly found a devoted readership that has only continued to grow in the subsequent century, so much so that he is today widely regarded as one of the finest poets in the English language. 

About the Speaker:

Michael D. Hurley is Professor of Literature and Theology, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Trinity College.

Educated at the Universities of Cambridge (PhD) and St Andrews (MA), he has taught at Cambridge since 2005. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard in 2009, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2021, and a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne in 2024.

Alongside his academic work, he frequently gives talks and public lectures on the philosophical and theological questions posed by art and literature. He is a contributor to the BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on the Today programme; recent episodes here on: beauty, gratitude, ancestors, creation, relics, fighting, euthanasia, reality, humour, discrimination, service.