HOPKINS, Gerard Manley. – Jesuit and English poet, b. at Stratford on 11 June 1844, d. at Dublin on 8 June 1889. From 1863 to 1867 he studied at Oxford (Balliol College) and there came into contact with the last exponents of the Oxford Movement, chiefly with Edward B. Pusey; but in 1866 he was converted to Catholicism. In his conversion the example of Cardinal Newman (q.v.) may have played some part, with whom H. was in correspondence. In 1868 he entered the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1877. He taught and preached in England and Wales, and in 1884 he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Dublin. He is buried in Glasnevin cemetery.
H. had written verses in his youth, but burned them all on entering the Society, judging poetry a worldly occupation; however, on 7 December 1875 the news of the wreck of the Deutschland, which was carrying five nuns expelled from Germany, moved his poetic soul; and then he asked for and obtained permission to write in verse. Thus was born The Wreck of the Deutschland (1844) and then the wreck of the Deutschland (1850). In these years, after which H. resumed writing, but in his lifetime he published nothing except a poem at twenty and a few occasional verses; his poems appeared in a single volume in 1918, edited by Robert Bridges, and from then on his fame has been increasingly affirmed. At first it was due above all to metrical innovations, to those very formal questions which led him to refuse the publication of The Wreck of the Deutschland in 1876; today a more thorough criticism recognises that the syncopated musicality of the rhythm is the expression of a tortuous sentiment, which rarely delights in the contemplation of the beauty of the world and in the recognition of its divine meaning, but more often, instead, is anguished by the transience and sinfulness of this same beauty loved to the point of feeling unworthy of II.