Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert and Jesuit priest. Born in Stratford, Essex, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford, became a Catholic in 1866 under the influence of John Henry Newman, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868. He burned his early verses on joining the order and wrote little for several years, until the wreck of the Deutschland in December 1875 drew from him the long ode that opened his mature manner.

His poems, built on what he called sprung rhythm and a dense, coined vocabulary of sound and image, found almost no readers in his lifetime. He worked as a teacher and parish priest, and from 1884 as professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, where he wrote the so-called terrible sonnets and died of typhoid in 1889. His friend Robert Bridges published the first collected Poems in 1918, and Hopkins has since been counted among the major Victorian poets.