Hopkins, Gerard Manley

(1844-1889)

   Born into a prosperous family in Stratford, Essex, he was brought up in Hampstead. At school he won the headmaster's poetry prize with his poem "The Escorial" in (1860). In 1866, while at Balliol College, Oxford, he converted to the Roman Catholic Church and in the following year completed his degree in literae humaniores. He joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1877, then spent his life teaching. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. He died in Dublin of typhoid fever and was buried in the common plot of the Jesuits at Glasnevin cemetery, near Dublin. He is one of the poets memorialized in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Before joining the Jesuits he symbolically burned all his poetry; Robert Bridges, to whom Hopkins sent copies, published a nearly complete edition of Hopkins' poems in 1918. Some of his poems: "A Vision of the Mermaids," "Duns Scotus's Oxford," "Songs from Shakespeare, in Latin and Greek," "Spring," "The Child is Father to the Man," "The Loss of the Eurydice," "The Windhover," "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Gerard Manley Hopkins. Catherine Phillips, ed. Oxford University Press, 1986. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).