Daniel Westover – författare

In R.S. Thomas - A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

In R.S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

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, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Charles Wright—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, 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 essays examine both known and unexpected affinities, and The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.

In R.S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

The discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry in the twentieth century was a revelation for postwar poets, who discovered in both Hopkins’s style and subject matter a voice seemingly bottled for their own time. This influence has not faded in the twenty-first century; in fact, it has grown all the more pervasive as poets from many backgrounds and nations have found, in the voice of this nineteenth-century Jesuit, a revolutionary way of addressing contemporary concerns relating to human imagination, ecology, “green” ethics, the role of art, and individual spirituality. The poets collected in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins engage with Hopkins in diverse ways. Some mention Hopkins or address some aspect of his life. Others channel his innovative poetics or address important Hopkinsian themes. All demonstrate the centrality of his influence in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, critics have mostly neglected the importance of Hopkins as a contemporary model, instead pinning his influence to the early twentieth century. In a climate where high modernism, Whitmanic free verse, and the confessional lyric are often held up as contemporary poetry’s dominant forerunners, this book proposes a more complex genealogy, tracing back to Hopkins and his influential early admirers current strands of emotional and spiritual openness, pleasure in word play and sonic textures, and veneration of the dynamic material world.