2.10.1: Gerard Manley Hopkins Biography

Gerard Manley Hopkins, born to Manley and Catherine Smith in 1844, went to grammar school in Highgate then to Balliol College, Oxford. There, he won a poetry prize for “The Escorial,” a poem about a ruined palace built to St. Lawrence. His tutors at Oxford included Walter Pater and theologian Benjamin Jowett. Hopkins vacillated between his interest in aestheticism and religion, ultimately converting to Roman Catholicism through the influence of John Henry Newman. Like Wilde, Hopkins graduated with a double first in Classics. Before entering the Society of Jesus, Hopkins experimented with various styles of poetry, including the Romantics’ and D. G. Rossetti’s and Christina Rossetti’s.

 

In 1862, when he entered training as a Jesuit, Hopkins burned his poems, considering poetry to be a distraction. As a priest, Hopkins held various posts in industrial cities. He taught at a seminary, eventually becoming a professor of Greek at a Catholic university in Dublin. He was uncertain whether or not this work was the right form of service to God, and he endured a tension between his religious and artistic desires.

In 1875 occurred the wreck of the Deutschland in which five Franciscan nuns died. It moved Hopkins to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” the first of his major poems. Reading the works of Duns Scotus (1265-1308) helped Hopkins to reconcile his faith and art, particularly as Hopkins developed his concept of “inscape.” As with landscape, inscape draws relationships and patterns, connecting individual objects with their groups by their significant patterns.

Through his study of Welsh, Hopkins developed another characteristic concept of his poetry, “sprung rhythm.” This unique, syncopated rhythm uses reversals of feet and is monosyllabic; the rhythm goes not by line but by stanza. Through it, Hopkins thought he could approximate ordinary speech in his poetry.

Up until 1884, Hopkins wrote a burst of poems, many of which used brilliant nature imagery. In the few years remaining before his death in 1889, Hopkins felt an alienation from God that he expressed in what are called the “terrible sonnets.” Few of Hopkins’s poems were published in the nineteenth century. His friend Robert Bridges published a heavily annotated edition of Hopkins’s poems in 1918.