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Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he studied Classics.

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Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he studied Classics.

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Born in 1844 to a comfortable Anglican family in the London suburb of Stratford, Essex, he was the oldest child of nine, and his father, Manley Hopkins, owned a firm that insured ships against wreck and damage. (His son Gerard later wrote two rather long shipwreck poems!) In 1852 his family moved to London’s leafy Hampstead, and young Gerard wrote poetry as a schoolboy at the Highgate School and in 1863 continued writing poetry at Oxford, where he made lifelong friends, especially Robert Bridges, his best friend and later a physician and Poet Laureate. At Oxford he had a religious crisis, and with the advice of John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic in 1866. On leaving Oxford in 1867, he taught for a year at Newman’s school in Birmingham, then in 1868 entered the Jesuit Order—the Society of Jesus—to begin studies for the priesthood. But before becoming a Jesuit he resolved to give up writing poetry, thinking (mistakenly) that writing poetry would distract him from his Jesuit and priestly life.

As a Jesuit, Hopkins first learned prayer and spirituality in London’s Roehampton, then studied philosophy in Lancashire where he discovered and came to love the philosophy of the medieval John Duns Scotus and his theory of individuality (“haecceitas,” or “thisness”), individuality being the unique selfhood of every being: for example, that one robin over there sitting on a branch is a totally different self from another robin sitting on the same branch. Then, after a year of teaching young Jesuits in London, in 1874 he went to study theology at St. Beuno’s College in beautiful North Wales.

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After "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Hopkins turned to shorter poetry, often written in the sonnet form. Yet he continued to experiment with sprung rhythm. As a result, many of these short lyrics exhibit a tension between the energy and force of the rhythm and the restriction of the form.

Many of the best of these lyrics express Hopkins's ecstatic joy in the beauty of nature. The journal which Hopkins kept from 1868 to 1875 reveals his constant effort to discern and reproduce the particular characteristics of a beautiful object or experience that distinguish it from any other. Hopkins called this individuality or "selfhood" of a thing "inscape" and designated the experience of perceiving inscape and thereby being joined more intimately with the object or experience as "instress."

The journal also shows that from his study of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the philosophy of John Duns Scotus, Hopkins extended his earlier, purely sensuous view of natural beauty to a sacramental view of nature as a material symbol of God's perfect spiritual beauty. The realization of natural beauty thus becomes a religious experience in which a perceiver is instressed with the inscape of a beautiful thing and thus instressed with God, the creator of that beauty. Many of Hopkins's most beautiful nature poems, such as "Pied Beauty" and "Hurrahing in Harvest, " describe precisely this experience. Others, like "God's Grandeur, " express Hopkins's despair that man's corruption prevents him from seeing natural beauty as "news of God." His most famous poem, "The Windhover, " records his realization of the inscape of Christ through the inscape of a hawk and poses his ecstatic joy in the beauty of both bird and Christ against his willing submission to the asceticism of routine religious duties.

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During the last 5 years of his life several problems conspired to depress Hopkins's spirits and restrict his poetic inspiration. He disliked living in Dublin "at a third remove" from England and friends, his work load was extremely heavy, his eyesight began to fail, and his general health deteriorated rapidly. He felt confined in a "coffin of weakness and dejection." Moreover, as a devout Jesuit, he found himself in an artistic dilemma. He had decided never to publish his poetry, to subdue any egotism which would violate the humility required by his religious position. But Hopkins realized that any true poet requires an audience for criticism as well as encouragement. This conflict between his religious obligations and his poetic talent caused him to feel that he had failed both.

Hopkins found himself "time's eunuch, " religiously sterile because removed from God's favor and poetically sterile because God is the religious poet's inspiration. In this "winter world" Hopkins's only solution was to make his religious sterility the subject matter of his seven "terrible sonnets … written in blood" in 1885. "To Seem the Stranger, " "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, " "No Worst, There Is None"—poems which Hopkins said came to him "unbidden and against my will"—record his deep despair, feeling of separation from God, and sense of personal worthlessness.

During the last 2 years of his life Hopkins wrote only five additional poems. Two of them still voice despair, but three climb toward renewed hope for reunion with God. The triumphant poem "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection" explains Hopkins's dying words, "I am so happy."

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In 1889, just five years after being appointed professor of Classics at UCD, Hopkins died from typhoid. After his death, Robert Bridges helped to publish and promote his friend's work, editing a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.