Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest whose bold, musical poems, such as The Windhover, Pied Beauty and The Wreck of the Deutschland, were almost unknown in his lifetime. Published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918, they made him one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
Works
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Oxford
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, the eldest of nine children of a marine insurance adjuster who also wrote poetry. A gifted student, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied classics and was taught by Walter Pater and Benjamin Jowett.
At Oxford he was drawn to the movement led by John Henry Newman, and in 1866 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, to the distress of his Anglican family. Two years later he decided to become a Jesuit and burned his early poems.
The Jesuit poet
For seven years he wrote almost no poetry. In 1875 news of the wreck of a German ship, the Deutschland, in which five Franciscan nuns exiled from Germany drowned, moved him to write a long ode. The Jesuit magazine refused it as too difficult.
While studying theology at St Beuno's College in North Wales, he wrote some of his finest sonnets, including God's Grandeur, The Windhover and Pied Beauty, celebrating the individuality of every created thing, which he called its inscape. He developed a new rhythm he called sprung rhythm.
Dublin
Ordained in 1877, Hopkins worked as a priest in London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow, and taught classics. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, where he was overworked and unhappy, and wrote the so-called terrible sonnets of spiritual desolation.
He died of typhoid fever in Dublin in 1889, at forty-four. His friend Robert Bridges, who had kept his manuscripts, published his poems only in 1918, when they were greeted as strikingly modern.
Anecdotes
Burned poems
When he decided to become a Jesuit in 1868, Hopkins burned copies of his early poems, considering poetry incompatible with his vocation. Fortunately, he had sent some of them to Robert Bridges, who preserved them.
Notebooks of nature
Hopkins kept journals full of minute observations of clouds, waves, trees and light, with drawings. These notebooks, published after his death, show the patient attention to nature that fills his poems.
Frequently asked questions
What are Hopkins's most famous poems?
The Windhover, Pied Beauty, God's Grandeur, Spring and Fall, The Wreck of the Deutschland and Carrion Comfort.
What is sprung rhythm?
A rhythm invented by Hopkins in which each foot has one stressed syllable and a variable number of unstressed ones, closer to natural speech and to old English verse.
When were Hopkins's poems published?
In 1918, nearly thirty years after his death, by his friend the poet Robert Bridges.