Gerard Manley Hopkins (Writers and Their Work)

The very high poetic reputation of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) has been entirely posthumous. Educated at Highgate and at Balliol College, Oxford, he was a pupil of Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater, and he numbered Robert Bridges, Coventry Patmore, R. W. Dixon, and, later, John Henry Newman among his friends. Hopkins entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1868, and in 1884 he was appointed to the Chair of Greek at Dublin University. A collected edition of his poetry did not appear until 1918, nearly thirty years after his death. Since then, admiration for his unique vision and his metrical experiments has widened in a remarkable way. Geoffrey Grigson's is an enthusiastic interpretation, written by a poet whose interest in the forms of nature has much of the acute perception which belonged to Hopkins himself. His essay will increase an interest which is already almost world-wide.