a late autograph draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ celebrated poem 'Binsey Poplars'. The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ was the most significant Hopkins item to have come to the market in over forty years.
An Oxford alumnus, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. Very few of his poems appeared during his lifetime and he owes his posthumous reputation to his friend, the poet Robert Bridges, who edited a volume of his poems that first appeared in 1918, thirty years after his death.
The only other known manuscripts of ‘Binsey Poplars’ survive in four copies kept in the Bodleian. The new manuscript includes important unrecorded and unpublished reconsidered readings, with extensive autograph deletions, revisions and repetitions. It has never been properly studied, and presents in its fascinating variant readings and (by comparison with the other surviving copies) critical evidence of the evolution of one of the most celebrated poems in the modern English literary tradition.
