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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=290

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Gerard Manley Hopkins including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.creighton.edu/~dcallon/Hopkins/

This link connects you to the Gerard Manley Hopkins Web page that contains several scholarly resources on the poet's life and writing.

BIOGRAPHY

The first of nine children born to Manley and Catherine Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins was born into a household of High Church Anglicans. He was not, however, the only poet in his family; the year before Gerard's birth, his father, a marine insurance adjuster, had published a volume of verse. Following in his father's footsteps, Gerard showed early promise as a poet by winning a poetry prize at High Gate, his grammar school before going on to win a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where he studied with such tutors as the famous English "Art-for-Art's-Sake" writer Walter Pater. Another powerful mentor at Oxford was John Henry Newman, whose conversion from the Anglican Church to Catholicism was an example that Hopkins followed in 1866. The following year he graduated with a "double-first" degree from Balliol and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868, eventually becoming ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1877. Although he turned away from poetry to pursue his religious vocation initially, his studies of the medieval Catholic philosopher Duns Scotus allowed him to find parallels between what the medievalist emphasized as the vivid uniqueness or haecceitas ("thisness") of experience and what Hopkins himself depicted as the perceptual intensity of poetic "inscape" in later works such as "God's Grandeur," "Pied Beauty," and "The Windhover." History, however, drew Hopkins back into poetry in the event of the loss of the ship the Deutschland, whose passenger list included five Franciscan nuns. Hopkins wrote his must challenging long poem The Wreck of the Deutschland in commemoration of this tragedy although the rector who had commissioned this work actually rejected it for final publication. During the late 1870s, Hopkins served briefly in Sheffield, Oxford as a preacher and in the early 1880s became parish priest, ministering to the working poor of Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. In the late 1880s, while teaching Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst College, Hopkins wrestled with modern religious doubt that produced the so-called "terrible" sonnets before his death from typhoid fever in 1889. Hopkins's major poetry did not appear in print in his lifetime, but thanks to Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate in 1913 and Hopkins's friend from Oxford, his work was published posthumously in 1918. Subsequently, the freshness of Hopkins's experiments in language, "sprung" rhythm, as well as poetic "inscape" and "instress" became a major influence in modern verse.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Fennell, Francis L, Ed. Rereading Hopkins: Selected New Essays. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1996.

Hollahan, Eugene. Hopkins Against History. Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1995.

Johnson, Margaret. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry. Brookfiled, VT: Ashgate, 1997.

Lawler, Justice George. Hopkins Re-Constructed: Life, Poetry, and the Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1998.

Saville, Julia F. A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Ward, Bernadette Waterman. Word as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2002.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER