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 Raman Catholicism in 1866, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868. 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 he caught typhoid and died in 1889.
