Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 to devout Anglican parents who
fostered from an early age their eldest son's commitment to religion and
to the creative arts. His mother, quite well educated for a woman of her
day, was an avid reader. His father wrote and reviewed poetry and even
authored a novel, though it was never published. Hopkins also had a number
of relatives who were interested in literature, music, and the visual
arts, some as dabblers and some professionals; he and his siblings
showed similarly creative dispositions from an early age, and Hopkins
enjoyed a great deal of support and encouragement for his creative
endeavors. He studied drawing and music and at one point hoped to become a
painter--as, indeed, two of his brothers did. Even his earliest verses
displayed a vast verbal talent.
Hopkins was born in Essex, England, in an area that was then being
transformed by industrial development. His family moved to the relatively
undefiled neighborhood of Hampstead, north of the city, in 1852, out of a
conviction that proximity to nature was important to a healthy, wholesome,
and religious upbringing. From 1854 to 1863 Hopkins attended Highgate
Grammar School, where he studied under Canon Dixon, who became a lifelong
friend and who encouraged his interest in Keats. At Oxford, Hopkins
pursued Latin and Greek. He was a student of Walter Pater and befriended the
poet Robert Bridges and Coleridge's grandson. In the 1860s
Hopkins was profoundly influenced by Christina Rossetti and was interested
in medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and developments in Victorian
religious poetry. He also became preoccupied with the major religious
controversies that were fermenting within the Anglican Church. Centered at
Oxford, the main debate took place between two reform groups: the
Tractarians, whose critics accused them of being too close to Catholicism
in their emphasis on ritual and church traditions (it was in this culture
that Hopkins was reared), and the Broad Church Movement, whose followers
believed that all religious faith should be scrutinized on a basis of empirical
evidence and logic. Immersed in intense debate over such issues, Hopkins
entered into a process of soul-searching, and after much deliberation
abandoned the religion of his family and converted to Catholicism. He
threw his whole heart and life behind his conversion, deciding to become a
Jesuit priest.
Hopkins undertook a lengthy course of training for the priesthood; for
seven years he wrote almost no verse, having decided that one who had
pledged his life to God should not pursue poetry. Only at the urging of
church officials did Hopkins resume his poetry, while studying theology in
North Wales, in 1875. He wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland in 1876
and, during the course of the next year, composed many of his most famous
sonnets. Hopkins's subject matter in these mature poems is wholly
religious--he believed that by making his work religious-themed he might
make poetry a part of his religious vocation. These post-1875 poems follow a
style quite different from that of Hopkins's earlier verse.
After his ordination in 1877, Hopkins did parish work in a number of
locales. He spent the last years of his short life quite unhappily in
Dublin, where he wrote a group of melancholy poems often referred to as
the "Terrible Sonnets" or "Sonnets of Desolation"; they exquisitely render
the spiritual anguish for which Hopkins is famous. The great poet died of
typhoid fever in 1877 in Dublin in 1877.
