Hopkins's letters are his secular confessional, and if we wish to understand the man and his poetry, this is material we cannot ignore. This is where his mind allowed itself its most expansive and unfettered expression.
This edition adds 43 letters to the total printed by Claude Colleer Abbott in his three-volume major edition of the mid-twentieth century. It further improves on the earlier editions in four ways: in its accuracy, in its order, in its inclusiveness, and in the thoroughness of its annotation. It is a completely new presentation of the letters, set out on radically different lines from earlier editions. It includes all the letters from Hopkins, but adds all the extant letters which were written to him. It is set out in a single chronological sequence, placing all the replies and queries at their appropriate place within the correspondence, thus providing as far as can be achieved, a narrative sequence. This acts in many ways as an informal intellectual biography of Hopkins, tracking his early ideas, his anxieties, his conversion, his friendships, his priesthood, his disappointments, and his ideas on literature and life. The transcriptions not only revise a large number of readings, but include all legible deletions and corrections, allowing the reader to follow the hesitancies and adjustments of Hopkins's mind.
Like most nineteenth-century poets, Hopkins never published a theoretical account of his work and his thoughts on poetry, but what he had to say can be found in these letters, and their extensive use by critics and poets indicates their richness as a source of ideas on Hopkins's poetry and on poetry and poetics in general.

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.

'To proceed & beginne wth ye Coullers, Whitt ffor its Virgin puritie is the most Excellent To proceed and begin with the colours: white for its virgin purity is the most excellent, viz. ceruse and white lead; both are subject to inconveniences, and are thus prevented: the ceruse, after you have wrought it, will tarnish, and many times look of a reddish or yellowish shine; the white lead, if too much ground, wiull glister or shine, and if you grind it too coarse will be unfit to work, and so unserviceable. There is but one way to remedy, which is to lay them in the sun two or three days before you grind them, which will exhale and draw away those salt and greasy mixtures that starve and poison the colours. ' Treatise on the Arte of Limning is one of the most important documents in the history of English art. Published in paperback for the first time, this edition provides a transcript of the original manuscript copy facing a modernised version, extensively annotated. The substantial introduction explores the history of the Treatise, the life of its author, its historical and artistic context, and the technique of limning.The Treatise combines elegance, information, personal forthrightness and spirited observation.

This edition includes all of Dowson's known poems. It describes in detail the contents of his manuscript notebook and re-transcribes the poems from it; it includes his two published volumes, Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899), his verse play The Pierrot of the Minute, the discrete independent parts of his verse translation of Voltaire, and a few uncollected pieces. All have been checked where possible against the original manuscripts and annotated to provide explanation and context.