HOPKINS, GERARD MANLEY. — English Jesuit and poet, born in Stratford on 11 June 1844, died in Dublin on 8 June 1889. From 1863 to 1867 he studied at Oxford (Balliol College), where he came into contact with the last representatives of the “Oxford Movement,” principally Edward B. Pusey; but in 1866 he converted to Catholicism. In his conversion, Newman (v.), with whom H. corresponded, may perhaps have played some part. In 1868 he entered the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1877. He taught and preached in England and Wales, and in 1884 was appointed professor of Greek at the University of Dublin. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
H. had written verse during his youth, but burned everything upon entering the Society, judging poetry to be a worldly occupation; however, on 7 December 1875, the news of the ship Deutschland’s shipwreck, which had been carrying five nuns expelled from Germany, moved his poetic soul; he then asked for and obtained permission to write about it in verse. Thus was born The Wrech of the Deutschland (“The Shipwreck of the Deutschland”), a poem of approximately 280 lines, after which H. began writing again. Yet during his lifetime he published nothing, except for one poem at the age of twenty and a few occasional verses; his poems appeared in a single volume in 1918, edited by Robert Bridges, and from then onward his reputation became increasingly firmly established. At first this was due above all to his metrical innovations, to those very formal concerns that led him to refuse publication of The Wrech of the Deutschland in 1876; today, more penetrating criticism recognizes that the syncopated musicality of the rhythm is the expression of a tortured feeling, which rarely finds peace in contemplating the beauty of the world and recognizing its divine significance, but more often,
instead, is anguished by the transience and sinfulness of this same beauty, loved to the point of feeling unworthy of II.