Gerard Manley Hopkins

By admin On April 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment · In Poets

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest known for his experimental and idiosyncratic poetic style. His whole family, including his father (Manley Hopkins), mother (Catherine), and eight younger siblings, was both artistic and deeply creative. Manley Hopkins was a published poet, and several of Gerard’s siblings became musicians, poets, and visual artists. The family moved to Hampstead in 1852, and Gerard was sent to the prestigious Highgate boarding school, where he received a good education and started writing poetry at an early age. On a scholarship to Oxford, he studied the classics, cultivated his poetic style, and developed his religious impulses. In 1866, he converted to Roman Catholicism and soon began studying to become a priest. Deciding that poetry was too self-indulgent for a priest, he burned his early poetry.

After further study, Hopkins came to the conclusion that, in light the long tradition of religious literature, he didn’t have to suppress his poetic impulses, and he took up poetry again in 1875. He spent the next several years teaching in various positions before settling at University College Dublin where he became a professor of Greek literature. It’s said that Hopkins’s Dublin years were lonely and plagued by depression, leading to the darker tone of his later poems. He remained there until his death of typhoid fever in 1889. At the time of his death, only a few of his poems had been published. It wasn’t until 1918, when English poet laureate Robert Bridges put together a collection of Hopkins’s work, that Hopkins began to achieve widespread recognition.

In his poetry, Hopkins worked to rejuvenate poetic language with surprising word combinations and innovative rhythmic effects. For this purpose he created sprung rhythm—a meter of varying foot length with emphasis on the first syllable of each foot—which, in comparison to traditional meter, he considered to be more faithful to spoken English.