Hopkins, Gerard Manley 1844-89
English poet

Born in London, he was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a pupil of Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater and a disciple of Edward Pusey, and met his lifelong friend Robert Bridges. Having followed John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, he was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1877. He taught at Stoneyhurst (1882-84) and became Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin (1884). None of his poems was published in his lifetime, but his friend Bridges brought out a full edition in 1918. His best-known poems include 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' (1876), 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty', in which he used what he called 'sprung rhythm'.

Bibliography: A G Sulloway, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (1972)