Gerard Manley Hopkins
born July 28, 1844, Stratford,
Essex, Eng.
died June 8, 1889, Dublin
English poet and Jesuit priest, one of
the most individual of Victorian writers.
His work was not published in collected form
until 1918, but it influenced many leading
20th-century poets.
Hopkins was the eldest of the nine
children of Manley Hopkins, an Anglican, who
had been British consul general in Hawaii
and had himself published verse. Hopkins won
the poetry prize at the Highgate grammar
school and in 1863 was awarded a grant to
study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he
continued writing poetry while studying
classics. In 1866, in the prevailing
atmosphere of the Oxford Movement, which
renewed interest in the relationships
between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism,
he was received into the Roman Catholic
Church by John Henry (later Cardinal)
Newman. The following year, he left Oxford
with such a distinguished academic record
that Benjamin Jowett, then a Balliol
lecturer and later master of the college,
called him “the star of Balliol.” Hopkins
decided to become a priest. He entered the
Jesuit novitiate in 1868 and burned his
youthful verses, determining “to write no
more, as not belonging to my profession.”
Until 1875, however, he kept a journal
recording his vivid responses to nature as
well as his expression of a philosophy for
which he later found support in Duns Scotus,
the medieval Franciscan thinker. Hopkins’
philosophy emphasized the individuality of
every natural thing, which he called
“inscape.” To Hopkins, each sensuous
impression had its own elusive “selfness”;
each scene was to him a “sweet especial
scene.”
In 1874 Hopkins went to St. Beuno’s
College in North Wales to study theology.
There he learned Welsh, and, under the
impact of the language itself as well as
that of the poetry and encouraged by his
superior, he began to write poetry again.
Moved by the death of five Franciscan nuns
in a shipwreck in 1875, he broke his
seven-year silence to write the long poem
“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in which he
succeeded in realizing “the echo of a new
rhythm” that had long been haunting his ear.
It was rejected, however, by the Jesuit
magazine The Month. He also wrote a series
of sonnets strikingly original in their
richness of language and use of rhythm,
including the remarkable “The Windhover,”
one of the most frequently analyzed poems in
the language. He continued to write poetry,
but it was read only in manuscript by his
friends and fellow poets, Robert Bridges
(later poet laureate), Coventry Patmore, and
the Rev. Richard Watson Dixon. Their
appreciation of the strangeness of the poems
(for the times) was imperfect, but they
were, nevertheless, encouraging.
Ordained to the priesthood in 1877,
Hopkins served as missioner, occasional
preacher, and parish priest in various
Jesuit churches and institutions in London,
Oxford, Liverpool, and Glasgow and taught
classics at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.
He was appointed professor of Greek
literature at University College, Dublin, in
1884. But Hopkins was not happy in Ireland;
he found the environment uncongenial, and he
was overworked and in poor health. From 1885
he wrote another series of sonnets,
beginning with “Carrion Comfort.” They show
a sense of desolation produced partly by a
sense of spiritual aridity and partly by a
feeling of artistic frustration. These
poems, known as the “terrible sonnets,”
reveal strong tensions between his delight
in the sensuous world and his urge to
express it and his equally powerful sense of
religious vocation.
While in Dublin, Hopkins developed
another of his talents, musical composition;
the little he composed shows the same daring
originality as does his poetry. His skill in
drawing, too, allowed him to illustrate his
journal with meticulously observed details
of flowers, trees, and waves.
His friends continually urged him to
publish his poems, but Hopkins resisted; all
that he saw in print in his lifetime were
some immature verses and original Latin
poems, in which he took particular pleasure.
Hopkins died of typhoid fever and was
buried in the Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Among his unfinished works was a commentary
on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.
After Hopkins’ death, Robert Bridges
began to publish a few of the Jesuit’s most
mature poems in anthologies, hoping to
prepare the way for wider acceptance of his
style. By 1918, Bridges, then poet laureate,
judged the time opportune for the first
collected edition. It appeared but sold
slowly. Not until 1930 was a second edition
issued, and thereafter Hopkins’ work was
recognized as among the most original,
powerful, and influential literary
accomplishments of his century; it had a
marked influence on such leading
20th-century poets as T.S. Eliot, Dylan
Thomas, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C.
Day Lewis.
Hopkins sought a stronger “rhetoric of
verse.” His exploitation of the verbal
subtleties and music of English, of the use
of echo, alliteration, and repetition, and a
highly compressed syntax were all in the
interest of projecting deep personal
experiences, including his sense of God’s
mystery, grandeur, and mercy, and his joy in
“all things counter, original, spare,
strange,” as he wrote in “Pied Beauty.” He
called the energizing prosodic element of
his verse “sprung rhythm,” in which each
foot may consist of one stressed syllable
and any number of unstressed syllables,
instead of the regular number of syllables
used in traditional metre. The result is a
muscular verse, flexible, intense, vibrant,
and organic, that combines accuracy of
observation, imaginative daring, deep
feeling, and intellectual depth.
Hopkins’ letters reveal a brilliant
critical faculty, scrupulous self-criticism,
generous humanity, and a strong will. His
friends paid tribute to his personal
integrity and to his rare “chastity of
mind.” Coventry Patmore wrote of him: “There
was something in all his words and manners
which were at once a rebuke and an
attraction to all who could only aspire to
be like him.”
John Cowie Reid
