Gerard Manley Hopkins

Born in Stratford, Essex, in 1844, he studied at Oxford, where he came under the influence of John Henry Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism. He later entered the Jesuit order and spent much of his adult life balancing the demands of religious vocation with an extraordinary private gift for poetry.

His poems are famous for their musical language, compressed energy, and close attention to the natural world. He developed what he called "sprung rhythm," a style that helped give poems such as The Windhover and Pied Beauty their distinctive force and freshness.

He died in Dublin in 1889, with most of his work unpublished. After his death, friends helped bring the poems into print, and readers came to recognize him as a major poet whose language and vision deeply influenced twentieth-century literature.