Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 at Stratford in Essex. After attending Highgate School, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner in 1863. Drawn into the religious controversy still active there, he was converted to Catholicism and upon graduation took a post as teacher in Newman's school, the Oratory, near Birmingham. The following year he decided to enter the Society of Jesus and burned copies of the poems he had written in symbolic dedication of himself to his new vocation. Two largely enjoyable years at the novitiate in London were followed by three spent in further study amidst the bleaker beauty of Lancashire. It was some years later, while Hopkins was studying theology in Wales, that he returned to poetic composition, writing in less than two years 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and more than a dozen good short poems. Between the end of his study of theology in 1877 and the respite of his tertianship in 1881 he held seven different posts up and down the country from London and Oxford to Liverpool and Glasgow. The final five years of his life were spent in Ireland as Professor of Greek and Latin Literature in the newly formed Catholic University College, Dublin. Here he was beset by overwork, distress at Irish hatred of England, and most of all, despite writing a number of poems now considered among his very best, by the growing conviction that he could not accomplish any literary work of recognized value. He died of typhoid in June 1889.