Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, the eldest of nine children in a prosperous Anglican family. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was influenced by John Henry Newman, and in 1866 he became a Roman Catholic. Two years later he entered the Society of Jesus, and he burned many of his early poems, believing poetry might conflict with his vocation. In 1875 his superiors encouraged him to write a poem about the wreck of the ship Deutschland, in which five Franciscan nuns drowned, and The Wreck of the Deutschland marked his return to poetry. He developed a rhythm he called 'sprung rhythm', and he used bold sound patterns and compound words to express what he called the 'inscape' of things. His poems include God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty and The Windhover. He was ordained a priest in 1877 and served in parishes in England and Scotland before becoming professor of Greek at University College Dublin. He died of typhoid in Dublin in 1889. His friend Robert Bridges published his poems in 1918.

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Faith: Jesuit priest and poet. Source: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)