1844-1889 · English poet and Jesuit priest known for his use of sprung rhythm
About Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest. Received into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman in 1866, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1868 and burned most of his early verse. He returned to poetry in 1875 with The Wreck of the Deutschland, developed the stress-based metre he called sprung rhythm, and died of typhoid in Dublin, where he taught classics; his poems were published only in 1918 by his friend Robert Bridges.
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”
written 1877; published 1918 · 19th Century · Poetry
God's Grandeur is an Italian sonnet that Hopkins wrote in February and March 1877 at St Beuno's College in North Wales, where he was studying theology in the final months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest. Like most of his poems it went unpublished in his lifetime; Robert Bridges printed it in 1918, almost thirty years after the poet's death.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.