Book description
Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence'
and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no
staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus at the
age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no
more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wishes of my
superiors'. The poems, letters and journal entries selected for this
edition were written in the following twenty years of his life, and
published posthumously in 1918. His verse is wrought from the creative
tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the
spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this
revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed,
innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-89) was born in Essex, the eldest son of a prosperous middle-class
family. He was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College, Oxford,
where he read Classics and began his lifelong friendship with Robert
Bridges. In 1866 he entered the Roman Catholic Church and two years
later he became a member of the Society of Jesus. In 1877 he was
ordained and was priest in a number of parishes including a slum
district in Liverpool. From 1882 to 1884 he taught at Stonyhurst College
and in 1884 he became Classics Professor at University College, Dublin.
In his lifetime Hopkins was hardly known as a poet, except to one or two
friends; his poems were not published until 1918, in a volume edited by
Robert Bridges.
