Sketches and Scholarly Studies: Part 1: Academic, Classical, and Lectures on Poetry offers an original perspective on Gerard Manley Hopkins's training as a classicist. R. K. R. Thornton's edition attempts to follow the turns of Hopkins's mind, and to clarify what he was exploring. The notes and introductions reveal how careful a scholar Hopkins was, how intricate his knowledge of the Classics, and how his critical positions developed. The edition reveals in
all its detail the range of Hopkins's research into the notion of poetry itself, when he prepared for his fellow Jesuits a course on 'rhetoric'. These areas were his training ground before he launched into his new-found poetic with 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. Through this authoritative critical edition,
we see Hopkins's continued exploration of metrics and glimpses of material which would grow into the major poetry that we know, but everywhere we can see the acuity of Hopkins's mind.