Gerard Manley Hopkins Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on 28 July 1844 in Stratford, Essex, then on the northeastern edge of London, into a cultivated, middle-class Anglican family. His father, Manley Hopkins, worked in marine insurance and also published verse; his mother, Catherine (Kate) Smith Hopkins, fostered devotional reading and a love of music and language. From an early age Hopkins drew, kept careful journals, and wrote poems, habits that foreshadowed the exactness of attention and compression of his mature style. He attended Highgate School, where the poet and historian Richard Watson Dixon taught and befriended him, encouraging his literary gifts and remaining a lifelong correspondent. In 1863 Hopkins went up to Balliol College, Oxford, reading Classics. Oxford in the 1860s exposed him to intense religious and aesthetic currents. He formed a crucial friendship with Robert Bridges, then an undergraduate who would become both a distinguished poet and Hopkins's most important literary advocate. Hopkins also encountered the lingering influence of the Oxford Movement and read the works and sermons of John Henry Newman, whose integrity and intellectual courage deeply impressed him.

Conversion and Vocation
In 1866, amid wrenching spiritual debate, Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. The decision brought familial distress and altered his academic prospects, but it clarified his sense of calling. After taking a First in Classics (1867), he began to discern a religious life and, in 1868, entered the Society of Jesus. During his Jesuit novitiate he burned much of his early poetry in an act of renunciation, believing his energies should be directed entirely toward God and the rigorous studies of Jesuit formation. He would later study philosophy and theology at Jesuit houses in England and Wales, developing a disciplined spiritual life alongside exacting scholarship.

Return to Poetry and Formal Innovation
Hopkins's superiors eventually encouraged him to write again, and in late 1875 the shipwreck of the Deutschland, in which five Franciscan nuns perished while fleeing anti-Catholic persecution, gave him a grave occasion. He composed The Wreck of the Deutschland, a long ode that inaugurated his mature style. Though a Jesuit journal declined to print it, the poem's daring rhythms and density revealed a new voice. While studying theology at St Beuno's College in North Wales (1874, 1877), he found landscapes whose beauty and particularity sheared through him with what he termed instress, the energy by which the distinctive pattern of a thing, its inscape, is charged upon the mind. Influenced by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus's idea of haecceity (thisness), Hopkins shaped a poetics of uniqueness: everything in nature is itself to a degree that is sacramental. To carry this perception, he devised and named sprung rhythm, a cadence keyed to stresses rather than syllable count, and forged compact compounds, alliteration, and internal rhyme into an instrument of praise and quick perception.

Priesthood, Ministry, and Poems of the 1870s
Ordained a priest in 1877, Hopkins served in schools and parishes, his pastoral work sharpening his attention to ordinary suffering and grace. At St Beuno's he wrote many of the nature sonnets that would make his reputation: God's Grandeur, The Windhover, Pied Beauty, As kingfishers catch fire, and Hurrahing in Harvest. He also turned his eyes to human vulnerability. In later pastoral assignments in industrial cities, including Liverpool and Glasgow, he visited the sick and dying; from this labor came, among other works, Felix Randal, a sonnet tracing a farrier's decline and the priest's complicity of care. He responded to public tragedies with high-art laments, notably The Loss of the Eurydice (1878), and to local wounds with Binsey Poplars (1879), mourning the felling of beloved trees near Oxford. Throughout, he exchanged candid letters with Robert Bridges and Richard Watson Dixon on the technicalities of meter, the risks of obscurity, and the spiritual pressures of his vocation. Their patience as readers, sometimes skeptical but always loyal, preserved manuscripts and carried his verse through years of neglect.

Teaching, Dublin Years, and the Terrible Sonnets
Jesuit obedience sent Hopkins wherever he was needed: to classrooms, pulpits, and confessional. The work was taxing, and he was often scrupulous about his own adequacy. In 1884 he was assigned to Dublin, where he lectured in Greek at University College and served as an examiner for the Royal University of Ireland. The heavy marking load, coupled with isolation and lingering illness, pressed on his spirits. Out of this darkness emerged the so-called terrible sonnets, among them I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day and No worst, there is none. These poems, written in the mid-1880s, compress anguish into an exact music that still bears his signature energy, balancing desolation with a fierce desire for God. Even in these straits he remained attentive to friendship. Letters to Bridges continued to weigh prosody and faith, while memories of Oxford companions, including the young poet Digby Dolben, whose early death had long haunted him, threaded his meditations on beauty, chastity, and loss.

Faith, Thought, and Craft
Hopkins's intellectual life was inseparable from prayer. He drew nourishment from Scripture, the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, and scholastic theology, especially Scotus, whose defense of particularity confirmed Hopkins's sense that beauty lies not in generalities but in the exact quiddity of things. His journals record bird flight, cloud weather, the colors of a leaf in rain, and the timbre of a human voice, all notated with painterly precision. The theory of inscape and instress was as much spiritual as aesthetic: to attend is to praise. He debated aesthetics too, reading contemporary figures with caution; the allure of Walter Pater's aestheticism, felt by many at Oxford, he met with a countervailing insistence on ethical and sacramental grounding. The disciplina of Jesuit life did not annul his art but honed it, and his friends, notably Bridges and Dixon, offered an interlocutor's steadiness during years when no audience seemed forthcoming.

Death and Posthumous Recognition
In 1889 Hopkins contracted typhoid fever in Dublin and died on 8 June at the age of 44. He was buried in the Jesuit plot at Glasnevin Cemetery. Witnesses reported his last words as a serene avowal, I am so happy, an utterance that, against the background of interior trial, has often moved readers. During his lifetime he published almost no poetry; the work remained in notebooks and letters carefully kept by Robert Bridges. In 1918, decades after Hopkins's death and with Bridges by then a prominent poet, the first volume of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins appeared, bringing sprung rhythm, rich consonance, and the theology of inscape to a public newly alert to modernist experiment. Subsequent editors and critics fleshed out the manuscripts and journals, and major poets and scholars found in him a precursor whose craft made strangeness a path to clarity.

Legacy
Today Hopkins stands as a central figure in English-language poetry, a bridge between Victorian religious imagination and modern technique. His friendships and mentors formed a web that sustained him: Manley and Catherine Hopkins shaped a home where words mattered; John Henry Newman received him into the Church and modeled intellectual fidelity; Richard Watson Dixon's loyalty kept an early flame alight; Robert Bridges's advocacy saved the poems from oblivion; and the memory of Digby Dolben's fragile ardor sharpened Hopkins's own ideal of purity. The result is a body of work small in quantity but immense in resonance, in which the exactness of perception answers the exacting call of conscience and God.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Gerard, under the main topics: Art - Nature - Faith - Poetry - Respect.