Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889 having published virtually nothing. He was a Jesuit priest who burned his early verse on entering the order and spent years unsure whether writing poems was compatible with his vocation. His friend Robert Bridges kept the manuscripts, waited nearly thirty years, and finally issued them in 1918, at which point a Victorian priest turned out to be one of the founding voices of modern poetry. The language is compressed and hammered, driven by what Hopkins called sprung rhythm, closer to how a person actually speaks than to metronome meter. “The Windhover” and “Pied Beauty” praise a God visible in the physical world. The late sonnets record the desolation of a man who could no longer feel that presence. Free PDF and EPUB.