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COPYRIGHT 2005 Marquette University Press
TUESDAY, MAY 11, 1976, GUSTAVE TUCK THEATRE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
NORMAN Mackenzie, it turned out, was the last lecturer in the series of annual Hopkins lectures sponsored by the English Hopkins Society. At the time of his lecture, Mackenzie was Professor of English at Queen's College in Canada and the president of the English Hopkins Society (its last president). He was and continued to become a much published Hopkins scholar. His principal scholarship is the editing of Hopkins's poems. He co-edited the fourth edition of the poetry with W.H. Gardner, and later was the sole editor of the Oxford Clarendon Press edition of the poetry, likely the standard edition of the poems for many years to come. He also produced two volumes of a facsimile edition of the poems and other associated writings, along with other studies of Hopkins. Mackenzie's main scholarly approach to Hopkins is linguistic. His lecture was drawn from this central emphasis on language analysis.
Mackenzie spent most of the lecture demonstrating how he approached Hopkins's manuscript texts in order to discover an accurate linguistic basis in the texts for supporting a particular reading. Mackenzie used passages from The Wreck to show its complicated literal and figurative density by parsing specific passages in the poem. What emerges is an attempt to penetrate the thickets of the ode's language complexity in order to locate the verbal tissue of the poem. This critical perspective might be called reading by establishing a linguistically based textual glossary. Mackenzie certainly demonstrated the rich but complicated verbal character of Hopkins's poetry. Yet Mackenzie admitted that the linguistic fullness of the ode still escaped him: "A great poem, like an intricate mountain range, has an amazing capacity...
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