author
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844–1889
A daring Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, he wrote with a musical intensity that made familiar subjects—faith, nature, grief—feel startlingly new. Though little known in his lifetime, he later came to be seen as one of the most original voices in English poetry.
1 Audiobook
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Now First Published
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
About the author
Born in Stratford, Essex, on July 28, 1844, he studied at Oxford, where he converted to Roman Catholicism and eventually entered the Jesuit order. His life was shaped by both religious commitment and artistic discipline, and those two forces remained closely tied in his writing.
His poems are famous for their compressed language, vivid natural imagery, and bold experiments with sound and rhythm, especially what he called "sprung rhythm." Poems such as God's Grandeur, The Windhover, and Pied Beauty show how intensely he looked at the natural world and how deeply he connected it to spiritual experience.
Most of his poetry was published only after his death in Dublin on June 8, 1889, which means he never saw the full influence of his work. Later readers and writers recognized just how innovative he had been, and he is now widely regarded as one of the great poets of the Victorian era.