Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89), born in Stratford, Essex, the eldest son of High Anglican, artistically minded parents Kate and Manley Hopkins. He was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by B.
Jowett, T. H.
Green, and
Pater (for his Greats examinations). At Oxford he became friendly with R.
Bridges. His intellectual interests ranged from
Heraclitus to
Hegel. He came under the influence of the
Oxford Movement and, with
Newman's guidance, was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. He taught for a year at Newman's Oratory school, Birmingham, and in 1868 he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Jesuit ‘formation’ included life as a novice (Roehampton), scholastic (Stonyhurst), ‘regent’ (Roehampton, as professor of rhetoric, 1873–4), and ‘theologian’ (St Beuno's in North Wales, 1874–7, where he learned Welsh). Following ordination in 1877, he had a peripatetic pastoral career. He worked in Chesterfield and London before being sent to Oxford, 1878–9; Parish life in industrial Liverpool and Glasgow overwhelmed him, and any hopes that he would be Newman-like in the community were not realized. He resumed teaching at Roehampton and Stonyhurst. In 1884 he was appointed to the chair of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. There he experienced extreme desolation, but life in Dublin was revived by friendship with Katharine
Tynan and others, travels, and visits to Monasterevan. He died of typhoid in June 1889.
The earliest poems express a Keatsian sensuousness, a Ruskinian zest for natural detail, and a distinctive flair for aural and rhythmic effects. Oxford texts such as ‘Heaven-Haven’ and ‘Easter Communion’ trace his desire for conversion. Always scrupulous and self-critical, Hopkins never reconciled writing poetry and serving God. When he joined the Jesuits, he symbolically burned his poems (though he sent some copies to Bridges for safekeeping) and stopped writing for eight years. Ironically, a disaster at sea in 1875 revived his creativity and produced ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. While studying for ordination, inspired by ‘God's grandeur’ in Wales, he composed a remarkable series of sonnets including ‘The Windhover’, ‘Spring’, and ‘Pied Beauty’. Aesthetic and moral questions intensify in subsequent poems such as ‘Henry Purcell’ and ‘Binsey Poplars’. Feeling exiled in Dublin, ‘selfwrung, selfstrung’, he composed the ‘terrible sonnets’ such as ‘Carrion Comfort’ and ‘No worst, there is none’, and ‘Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves’. But he was also inspired to write ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ and ‘To R.B.’
Schooled to discern the ‘science of aspects’, Hopkins developed theories of natural essence and expressiveness, and of metre, and coined the terms ‘inscape’, ‘instress’, and ‘sprung rhythm’. ‘Inscape’ refers to ‘the individual or essential quality of the thing’ or ‘individually-distinctive beauty of style’. ‘Instress' is the force or energy which sustains an inscape’. (Hopkins uses ‘pitch’ to express
Duns Scotus' concept of
haecceitas, or ‘thisness’.)
Sprung rhythm, which he believed ‘gives back to poetry its true soul and self’, is distinguished from regular or ‘running rhythm’ (with its regular metrical feet) because it involves writing and scanning by number of stresses rather than by counting syllables.
Surviving journals, notebooks, and letters articulate his profound responsiveness to nature and beauty, his acumen as a literary critic and theorist of prosody, his playful wit, and his devoted friendship. His sermons and spiritual writings are extraordinary for their style and insights informed by the
Spiritual Exercises of
Ignatins Loyola. The visual arts were crucial to his refined aesthetic sensibilities. He was a keen enthusiast of the
Pre-Raphaelites; his own talents as a sketch artist were encouraged by studies of
Ruskin, the example of his aunt, the painter Frances Hopkins, and his brothers, Arthur and Everard, illustrators. Yet disturbed by the ‘dangerous’ potential of mortal (especially masculine) beauty, he gave up sketching, and in later years explored musical theory and composition.
His first surviving poem, ‘The Escorial’, won the schoolboy a prize, but poetic fame was posthumous and gradual. In 1881 R. W.
Dixon persuaded Hopkins to submit some sonnets to an anthology which
Caine was preparing, but they were rejected. Bridges became the guardian of the manuscripts after Hopkin's death. A few texts were placed in anthologies, including Bridges's own
The Spirit of Man (1916), but no edition of Hopkin's poems appeared until
Poems of 1918. Only the second edition, produced by C.
Williams in 1930, attracted the attention of readers such as
Auden,
Spender, and
Thomas, and critics such as F. R.
Leavis. T. S.
Eliot was persuaded to publish excerpts from the letters and notebooks in the
Criterion.
