The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English. The poetry is all the more striking because it comes from a Victorian priest who spent his short life in virtual retirement from the world.
Hopkins was born at Stratford in England in 1844, went to Oxford in 1863 where he starred academically, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866, and entered the Society of Jesus in1868. At this time he burnt all the poetry he had so far written and “resolved to write no more,” a resolution he faithfully kept for seven years. In December 1875, he broke his self-imposed silence and wrote the amazing poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland.’ After this he continued to write until the time of his death, though he only shared his poems with friends and never published. On the surface he lived an utterly uneventful life as a teacher and parish priest until he caught typhoid and died in 1889. His last words were, “I am so happy, so happy.”
The English Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, with whom Hopkins corresponded, thought Hopkins’ poetry had “bad faults” and was too obscure for the ordinary reader. Any poetry which demands “a conscious effort of interpretation” must necessarily be bad, Bridges absurdly wrote. Nevertheless, Bridges must have had a conscience about the genius and originality h