Gerard Manley Hopkins was a 19th-century poet who wrote the most innovative Christian poetry since John Milton of Paradise Lost fame.
Brief Biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844 in Stratford near London. He came from a well-to-do family. Out of his parents came strict, conservative beliefs and in particular, an interest in the arts. At school, he won a poetry prize, and when he went to study at Oxford University he wrote poems, and converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 22.
At age 24, from 1868 to 1877, he trained to become a Jesuit priest and was ordained. For most of these years he wrote no poetry until encouraged by his Jesuit superior and colleagues. As an ordained priest, Hopkins preached and taught in England and Scotland.
In 1884, he became professor of Greek literature at University College, Dublin where he later died of typhoid.
The Inspired Poet
When he was 31, the sinking of a German ship in which five nuns died inspired him to write "The Wreck of the Deutschland." (1875) This long, complex poem of dramatic intensity made lively use of what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm," based on the natural rhythms or pure forms in which people speak.
The very same internal rhythm is also found in his other great shorter poems, such as "The Windhover" and "Pied Beauty."
The so-called "Terrible Sonnets" of his last years show him torn between love of the world and obligation to God.
Much of Hopkins' strange, abrupt verse is about God's relationship to humanity. His ideas and style owed debts to earlier thinkers and poets, including John Donne. Hopkins influenced W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and many other 20th-century prominent poets.
A poet of the Victorian era, Hopkins contributed the principle of "sprung rhythm" to English poetry. A poet who was virtually unknown in his lifetime, the works of Hopkins were not published until 1918. At the age of 44, Hopkins died in Dublin on June 8, 1889.
Quoted from a Poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
"Whatever is fickle, freckled
Who knows how?
With swift, slow; sweet, sour;
Adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty
Is past change:
Praise him."
~ "Pied Beauty"
Works by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Published after he died)
- Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918
- Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges; The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson-Dixon, 1935
- Notebooks and Papers, 1937
- Further Letters, 1938
Sources:
- McGovern, Una, Ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers / Harrap Publishers, 2002.
- Ousby, Ian. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Payne, Tom. The A-Z of Great Writers. London: Carlton, 1997.
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