Beschreibung
A rare survival from the library of Gerard Manley Hopkins, presented to him while he was a student at Highgate School in 1860, perhaps awarded for his poem "The Escorial" which won the school's poetry prize that year. This copy offers a precious surviving connection to Hopkins's poetic life before his conversion to Catholicism in 1867, when he burned all his own juvenile poetry. The book was presented to Hopkins by the school's headmaster, John Bradley Dyne. Hopkins went up to Oxford in 1863 to read classics at Balliol and graduated in 1867 with a double first. He produced his own distinctive versions of Horace's Odes 1.38, 2.17, and 3.1 and referred multiple times to Horace in his lecture notes on "Rhythm and the Other Structural Parts of Rhetoric-Verse" (1873 4). In that essay, Hopkins observes that "bare rhythm would be monotonous. Monotony is prevented.by emphatic accent of the words. In Greek this was probably so slight as not to be felt, in French it is felt but is haphazard. In Latin it was marked and was made use of by the poets, especially the great masters of metre as Horace and Ovid to give counterpoint beat by which they produced forms"; in this, one might perceive some deep classical roots to the poet's revolutionary concept of "sprung rhythm". Milman's Life of Horace was attractively produced by Murray, with variously coloured and decorated page borders and initials in a classical style, as well as engraved views of sites pertinent to Horace's life, such as Mount Soracte. The award of this Horatian volume to Highgate's promising young poet fits with the established preference for Horace in Victorian England, when "Horace was the classical author who was best remembered, and school children were expected to learn substantial portions of his work by heart" (Arkins). Horace's verse was ingrained in the minds of an entire generation of British poets, with his influence evident from Dowson (whose best-known poem, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cinarae", takes its title from Odes 1.4) to Stevenson (who borrowed the title of his first book of essays, Virginibus Puerisque, from Odes 3.1). Kipling remarked that his Latin teacher "taught me to loathe Horace for two years; to forget him for twenty; and then to love him for the rest of my days and through many sleepless nights". Books or papers from Hopkins's library are scarce, most being held at the Bodleian and Balliol College libraries. Brian Arkins, "Gerard Manley Hopkins and Horace", available online. Octavo (215 x 148 mm). Illustrations to the text, patterned borders printed in various colours, initial letters printed in black and red. Original paper boards, spine titled in red, sides with red-ruled borders, Highgate School coat of arms stamped to covers in gilt, red edges. Housed in a black cloth flat-back box by the Chelsea Bindery. Boards rubbed, soiled, and slightly foxed, some superficial cracks to front joint, a few faint marks to outer leaves, short closed tear to lower margin of p. 193/4, contents otherwise clean. A good copy. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 164954
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