Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–1889)

English poet and Jesuit priest. His works are marked by originality of diction and rhythm and include ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1876), and ‘The Windhover’ and ‘Pied Beauty’ (both 1877). His collected works were published in 1918 (after the author's death) by his friend, the poet Robert Bridges. His employment of ‘sprung rhythm’ (the combination of traditional regularity of stresses with varying numbers of syllables in each line) greatly influenced later 20th-century poetry. His poetry is profoundly religious and records his struggle to gain faith and peace, but also shows freshness of feeling and delight in nature.

Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, and was educated at Oxford, where he became friendly with Bridges. While still an undergraduate he was converted to Roman Catholicism, under the influence of English theologian John Newman, and after teaching for some time in Birmingham he decided to become a Jesuit. Ordained in 1877, he worked as a parish priest in London, Oxford, in a slum area of Liverpool, and in Glasgow; later he taught at Stonyhurst. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Greek literature at University College, Dublin, but he resigned in 1889.