Gerard Manley Hopkins burned his poems and stayed silent for seven years
In May 1868, days after resolving to enter religious life, a young Oxford graduate built a bonfire of his own verse and almost stopped writing. He broke the silence only when a Jesuit superior asked for a poem about a shipwreck. Most of what he wrote afterwards appeared only after his death, and it changed English poetry.
Hopkins was born in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, the eldest of nine children in a devout high-church Anglican household. His father ran a marine insurance firm, served for a time as Hawaii's consul-general in London and wrote verse of his own. The boy first wanted to be a painter and sketched all his life. His siblings scattered across the arts: one sister set his poems to music, two brothers became successful artists, and another brother, Lionel, became a renowned authority on archaic Chinese.
An ascetic streak showed early. At Highgate School he bet classmates that people drank far more than they needed and went a week without liquid, until his tongue turned black and he collapsed during drill. At Balliol College, Oxford, he read Classics, was tutored by Walter Pater and formed a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges. In 1865 he met Digby Mackworth Dolben, a seventeen-year-old poet whom biographer Robert Bernard Martin calls the great emotional event of his life. Dolben drowned in 1867 without the two meeting again. Meanwhile John Henry Newman received Hopkins into the Catholic Church in October 1866, a step that estranged him from his family.
Jesuit training followed from 1868. Reading the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus in 1872 persuaded him that poetry and devotion need not be enemies. In 1875 he answered his superior's request with The Wreck of the Deutschland, about a ship lost with 157 lives, among them five Franciscan nuns escaping anti-Catholic laws in Germany. Its strange metre, the sprung rhythm that became his hallmark, puzzled a Jesuit journal, which accepted it but never printed it. The Windhover and God's Grandeur came in 1877, the year of his ordination, though a failed theology exam limited his prospects in the order.
From 1884 he taught Greek and Latin at University College Dublin, lonely, overworked and uneasy with Irish politics. The bleak poems of those years became known as the terrible sonnets. He died in 1889. Bridges later brought his work to print, and by 1930 critics ranked it among the most original writing of the nineteenth century.
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins
