Gerard Manley Hopkins
Who was Gerard Manley Hopkins?
English poet (1844–1889)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Gerard Manley Hopkins (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, Essex, England. He was the oldest of nine children in a well-off family that valued culture. His father, Manley Hopkins, worked as a marine insurance agent and was also an amateur poet. In their home, literature and the arts were actively supported. Hopkins showed an early talent for both poetry and visual art, and this blend of skills marked his work throughout his life. He went to Highgate School, where he won a poetry prize, which hinted at the intellectual talent that later took him to Oxford.
At Balliol College, Oxford, Hopkins studied Classics and was influenced by Walter Pater and Benjamin Jowett. More importantly, he was impacted by the writings and example of John Henry Newman, whose shift to Roman Catholicism had shaken Victorian religious life. In 1866, Hopkins converted to Catholicism with Newman's guidance, a decision that distanced him from his Anglican family and changed the course of his life. The next year, he decided to join the Jesuit novitiate and burned the poems he had written up to that point, thinking that writing poetry was not compatible with his religious calling.
For several years, Hopkins wrote little poetry, focusing on Jesuit training and theological study. The turning point came in 1875 when the Deutschland, a German steamship, sank in the Thames estuary during a storm, killing five Franciscan nuns among the passengers. Hopkins's rector encouraged him to write about it, which led to The Wreck of the Deutschland, a long ode introducing his concept of sprung rhythm, based on the number of stressed syllables per line instead of a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed feet. The poem was sent to the Jesuit journal The Month but was rejected as too difficult, remaining unpublished in his lifetime.
Hopkins became a Jesuit priest in 1877 and worked in parishes and schools across England and Scotland, including Liverpool and Glasgow, where the poverty and misery he saw affected him deeply. In 1884 he was appointed Professor of Greek and Latin Literature at University College Dublin, a role that he found isolating and draining. Ireland’s political tensions and his own spiritual struggles led to what he called the 'terrible sonnets,' a series of poems exploring spiritual crisis and psychological pain. He died in Dublin on June 8, 1889, from typhoid fever at age forty-four, with almost none of his mature work published.
Hopkins's innovations included 'inscape' and 'instress,' ideas partly drawn from medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. These referred to the unique inner form of a thing and the force that holds that form together, communicating it to a perceiving mind. These ideas gave his nature poetry an intensity and specificity rarely found in Victorian verse. His friend and poet Robert Bridges preserved his manuscripts and, after two decades of careful preparation, published Hopkins's collected poems in 1918. By the 1930s, his reputation had grown significantly, and he became recognized as an important precursor of modern poetry.
Before Fame
Hopkins grew up in a home that valued intellectual and artistic achievement, and his early schooling at Highgate set him up well for Oxford. He arrived at Balliol College in 1863 with a strong classical education and a keen interest in poetry and drawing. During his undergraduate years, he met some of the leading minds of Victorian England and encountered the religious debates that were changing the Church of England.
His conversion to Catholicism in 1866 and entry into the Society of Jesus in 1868 effectively separated him from the literary world of his peers. While poets like Tennyson and Browning regularly published and gained public recognition, Hopkins wrote in isolation, sharing his poems mainly in letters to Bridges and the poet Richard Watson Dixon. The conditions of his religious life, along with his demanding roles in parishes and academic institutions, meant that he only gained wider recognition after his death.
Key Achievements
- Developed the concept of sprung rhythm, a prosodic innovation that influenced twentieth-century English poetry.
- Wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland, a structurally complex ode widely regarded as one of the major poems in the English language.
- Produced the 'terrible sonnets,' a sequence of poems exploring spiritual desolation with a psychological depth unusual in Victorian verse.
- Formulated the philosophical and aesthetic concepts of 'inscape' and 'instress,' providing a distinctive framework for understanding individuality in nature and art.
- Achieved posthumous recognition as one of the most original poets of the nineteenth century, with his 1918 collected edition becoming highly influential on modernist writers.
Did You Know?
- 01.Hopkins burned nearly all the poems he had written before entering the Jesuit novitiate in 1868, considering them a distraction from his religious duties.
- 02.He invented the term 'sprung rhythm' to describe a prosodic system in which the metre is determined by stressed syllables alone, which he believed reflected the natural patterns of English speech.
- 03.His concept of 'inscape,' derived partly from the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, referred to the unique, irreducible individuality that distinguishes each created thing.
- 04.The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest and most ambitious poem, was rejected by the Jesuit journal The Month and was not published until Robert Bridges included it in the 1918 collected edition.
- 05.Hopkins also had a serious interest in music and composed several pieces, though his musical works have received far less attention than his poetry.