Hopkins, Gerard Manley

(1844–89)

   Poet.

   Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, and he was educated at the University of Oxford. At the age of twentytwo he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Jesuit Order. He gave up writing poetry when he entered the religious life, but was encouraged to resume by his Superior. His poems are distinctive for their sharp and vivid language: ‘That night, that year/Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God’ (‘Carrion Comfort’). They were not published until 1918 when they were issued by his literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges. Today Hopkins is recognised, with T.S. Eliot, as one of the great devotional poets of the twentieth century.

   G. Storey (ed.), The Journal and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959);

   E. Hollahan (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins and Critical Discourse (1993);

   G. Storey, A Preface to Hopkins, 2^nd edn (1992);

   N. White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (1992).