Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest. Although his poetry was not widely known during his lifetime, his prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – made him an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature.
After his death Robert Bridges published a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies. By 1930 Hopkins's work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex (now in Greater London), as the eldest of nine children to Manley and Catherine Hopkins, née Smith. He was christened at the Anglican church of St John's, Stratford.
His father, Manley Hopkins, founded a marine insurance firm and at one time served as Hawaiian consul-general in London. He was also for a time churchwarden at St John-at-Hampstead. He was a prolific writer who published several works of poetry, including A Philosopher's Stone and Other Poems (1843), Pietas Metrica (1849), and Spicelegium Poeticum, A Gathering of Verses by Manley Hopkins (1892). He also wrote a history of Hawaii, A Manual of Marine Insurance, A Handbook of Averages and an unpublished novel, and in addition to this wrote and reviewed poetry for The Times.
Catherine (Smith) Hopkins was the daughter of a London physician, and was particularly fond of music and of reading, especially German philosophy, literature and the novels of Dickens. Both parents were deeply religious high-church Anglicans. Catherine's sister, Maria Smith Giberne, taught Hopkins to sketch. The interest was supported by his uncle, Edward Smith, his great-uncle Richard James Lane, a professional artist, and other family members. Hopkins's initial ambition was to be a painter – he pursued his interest in sketching throughout his life and was inspired as an adult by the work of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Hopkins's grandfather was the physician John Simm Smith, a university colleague of John Keats, and a close friend of the philanthropist Ann Thwaytes. One of his uncles was Charles Gordon Hopkins, a politician of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and he was a first cousin of the writer, historian and suffragette Isabel Giberne Sieveking.
Hopkins found his early training in visual art supported his later work as a poet. His siblings also drew inspiration from literature, religion, and the arts. In 1878, his sister Milicent (1849–1946) enrolled in an Anglican sisterhood. Kate (1856–1933) would help Hopkins publish the first edition of his poetry. His youngest sister Grace (1857–1945) set many of his poems to music. Lionel (1854–1952) became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese. Arthur (1848–1930) and Everard (1860–1928) were highly successful artists. Cyril (1846–1932) would join his father's insurance firm.
In 1852, the family moved to Hampstead , near where John Keats had lived 30 years before and close to the green spaces of Hampstead Heath. When Hopkins was ten years old, he was sent to board at Highgate School (1854–1863). While studying Keats's poetry, he wrote "The Escorial" (1860), his earliest extant poem. Here too he practised early attempts at asceticism. He once argued that most people drank more liquids than they really needed and bet that he could go without drinking for a week. He persisted until his tongue was black and he collapsed at drill. On another occasion, he abstained from salt for a week. Among his teachers at Highgate was Richard Watson Dixon, who became an enduring friend and correspondent. Of the older pupils Hopkins recalls in his boarding house, the poet Philip Stanhope Worsley won the Newdigate Prize.
Hopkins studied Classics at Balliol College, Oxford (1863–1867). There he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges (later Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom), a relationship which proved important to his development as a poet and in establishing his posthumous acclaim. Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti, who became one of his great contemporary influences. The two met in 1864. During this time he also studied with the writer and critic Walter Pater, who tutored him in 1866, and they stayed friends until Hopkins left Oxford for the second time in October 1879.
In a journal entry of 6 November 1865, Hopkins declared his ascetic intentions for his life and work: "On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it." On 18 January 1866, Hopkins composed his poem, The Habit of Perfection. On 23 January, he included poetry in a list of things to be given up for Lent. In July, he decided to become a Roman Catholic and travelled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts, John Henry Newman. Newman received him into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866.
This decision to convert estranged Hopkins from his family and from a number of acquaintances. After graduating in 1867, he was provided by Newman with a teaching post at the Oratory in Birmingham. While there he began to study the violin. On 5 May 1868 Hopkins firmly "resolved to be a religious." Less than a week later, he made a bonfire of his poetry and gave it up almost entirely for seven years. He also felt a call to enter the ministry and decided to become a Jesuit. He paused first to visit Switzerland, which officially forbade Jesuits to enter.
In September 1868, Hopkins began his Jesuit novitiate at Manresa House, Roehampton, under the guidance of Alfred Weld. Two years later he moved to St Mary's Hall, he moved there to Stonyhurst, for philosophical studies, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 8 September 1870. He felt that his interest in poetry had stopped him devoting himself wholly to religion. However, on reading Duns Scotus in 1872, he saw how the two need not conflict. He continued to write a detailed prose journal in 1868–1875. Unable to suppress a desire to describe the natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions, wrote "verses". He later wrote sermons and other religious pieces.
In 1874, Hopkins returned to Manresa House to teach Classics. While studying in the Jesuit house of theological studies, St Beuno's College, near St Asaph in Wales, he was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the wreck of a German ship in a storm, so in 1875 he took up poetry once more to write a lengthy piece, "The Wreck of the Deutschland", inspired by the Deutschland incident, a maritime disaster in which 157 people died, including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws (see Kulturkampf). The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusual metre and rhythms of Hopkins's subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds of the disaster, but tells of him reconciling the terrible events with God's higher purpose. The poem was accepted, but not printed, by a Jesuit publication. This rejection fed Hopkins's ambivalence about his poetry, most of which remained unpublished until after his death.
The life of a Jesuit was austere and restrictive. Hopkins's biographer Robert Bernard Martin notes that: "the life expectancy of a man becoming a novice at twenty-one was twenty-three more years rather than the forty years of males of the same age in the general population." Hopkins, who had left Oxford with first-class honours, failed his final theology exam. This meant that despite his ordination in 1877, he was unikely to progress in the order.
In 1877 he wrote God's Grandeur, an array of sonnets that included "The Starlight Night". He finished "The Windhover" only a few months before his ordination. His life as a Jesuit trainee, though rigorous, isolated and sometimes unpleasant, at least had some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. In October 1877, not long after completing "The Sea and the Skylark" and only a month after his ordination, Hopkins took up duties as sub-minister and teacher at Mount St Mary's College near Sheffield. In July 1878 he became curate at the Jesuit church in Mount Street, London, and in December that of St Aloysius's Church, Oxford, then moving to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. While ministering in Oxford, he became a founding member of The Newman Society, established in 1878 for Catholic members of the University of Oxford. He taught Greek and Latin at Mount St Mary's College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.