About the author: John Delli Carpini received his PhD from Temple University in 1989 and has taught English and European literature at Gwynned Mercy College, Manor Junior College, and Saint Charles Seminary College. He is the author of Prayer and Piety in the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1998) and Poetry as Prayer: Emily Dickinson (2002) and writes regularly for Vocation and Prayer magazine. He publishes often about religion and literature.
2004 0-7734-6411-5 A complete and thorough study of William Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets emphasizing especially religion and history. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets are a sonnet sequence of 132 poems beginning with the founding of Christianity in England to the state of religion in Wordsworth’s day. Although a later work, they characterize many topics close to Wordsworth’s heart – the idea of history, pantheism, nature and Christianity. This book studies history and religion as well as Wordsworth’s use of sonnet sequence, a genre of his later writing. There has been very little written about the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. This book will help students to achieve a complete view of Wordsworth the young romantic as well as the elder statesman (poet laureate) of England.
1998 0-7734-8380-2 This study focuses on poems that are either addressed totally and directly to God or the Blessed Virgin Mary; poems that are prayers in part; and poems that are meditations on a religious theme. It categorizes the poems by the topics most influential in shaping Hopkins' spiritual and poetic life: the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, the dark night of the soul, spiritual wrecking, nature, attainment of spiritual perfection, and the resurrection of the body. It chronicles the progress of Hopkins' spiritual life and his efforts to minimize himself as a poet and render praise and honor to God as a priest, seeking connections among poems, prayers, and spiritual meditations, examining them organically by asking how they reflect Hopkins' erratic relationship to God. It also examines the poems in light of his sermons, letters, and spiritual writings which clarify his religious sentiments and complete the portrait of Hopkins the poet and the priest.