BIOGRAPHY (2)
Life
Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex. He was the eldest of nine
children, the son of Catherine and Manley Hopkins, an insurance agent and
consul-general for Hawaii based in London. He was educated at Highgate School and then Balliol College, Oxford,where he studied classics. It
was at Oxford that he forged the friendship with Robert Bridges which would be of importance in his
development as a poet, and posthumous acclaim. He began his time at Oxford as a
keen socialiser and prolific poet but he seems to have alarmed himself with this
change in his behaviour and became more studious and recorded his sins in his
diary. He became a follower of Edward Pusey and a member of
the Oxford Movement and in
1866, following the example of John Henry Newman, he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. After his graduation in 1867 Newman found him
a teaching post but the following year he decided to enter the priesthood,
pausing only to visit Switzerland.
Influenced by his father who also wrote poetry,
Hopkins wrote poetry while young, winning a prize for his poetry while at
grammar school. His decision to become a Jesuit led him to burn much of his
early poetry as he felt it incompatible with his vocation. Writing would remain
something of a concern for him as he felt that his interest in poetry prevented
him from wholly devoting himself to his religion. He continued to write a
detailed journal until 1874. Unable to suppress his desire to describe the
natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions he wrote
some "verses," as he called them. He would later write sermons and other
religious pieces. In 1875 he was moved, once more, to write a lengthy poem,
The Wreck of the Deutschland. This work was inspired by the Deutschland,
a naval disaster in which 157 people died including five Franciscan nuns who had
been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws. The work displays both the
religious concerns and some of the unusual meter and rhythms of his subsequent
poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the
dramatic events and heroic deeds but also tells of the poet's reconciling the
terrible events with God's higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed
by a Jesuit publication, and this rejection fueled his ambivalence about his
poetry.
Hopkins chose the austere and restrictive life of a Jesuit and
was at times gloomy. The brilliant student who had left Oxford with a first
class honours degree failed his final theology exam. This failure meant that,
although ordained in 1877, Hopkins would not likely progress in the order.
Though rigorous and sometimes unpleasant, his life during Jesuit training had at
least some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even
harder on his sensibilities. He served in various parishes in England and
Scotland and taught at Mount St Mary's College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. In 1884 he became
professor of Greek literature at University College Dublin. His English
roots and his disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, as well as his
own small stature , unprepossessing nature and own personal oddities meant that
he was not a particularly effective teacher. This as well as his isolation in
Ireland deepened his gloom and his poems of the time, such as I Wake and Feel
the Fell of Dark, reflected this. They came to be known as the "terrible
sonnets," not because of their quality but because according to Hopkins' friend
Canon Dixon, they reached the "terrible crystal," meaning that they crystallized
the melancholy dejection which plagued the latter part of this
life.
After suffering ill health for several years and bouts of
diarrhoea, Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Though he suffered from what today might be diagnosed as manic depression, and
battled a deep sense of anguish throughout his life, upon his death bed, he
evidently overcame some of his feelings of despondency, at times stygian in
their intensity. His last words were "I am so happy, I am so happy."
Poetry
Much of Hopkins' historical importance has to do with the changes
he brought to the form of poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of
meter. Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based
on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English's literary
heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or three syllables,
with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins
called this structure running rhythm, and though he wrote some of his early
verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure
of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Hopkins called his own
rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a
variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot,
with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. In reality, it
more closely resembles the "rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet
who disavowed conventional meter. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape
the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably, pushed poetry
written in it to become "same and tame." In this way, Hopkins can be seen as
anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of
the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite.
. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary and neo-romanticism schools, although he
does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor
to modernist poetry or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.One more
influence on him was the Welsh language he learnt while studying
theology at St. Beuno's College in Wales. The poetic forms of Welsh
literature and particularly cynghanedd with its emphasis on repeating sounds
accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. This
reliance on similar sounding words with close or differing senses mean that his
poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his work is
Hopkins' own concept of "inscape" which was derived, in part, from the medieval
theologian Duns Scotus. The exact detail of
"inscape" is uncertain and probably known to Hopkins alone but it has to do with
the individual essence and uniqueness of every physical thing. This is
communicated from an object by its "instress" and ensures the transmission of
the item's importance in the wider creation. His poems would then try to present
this "inscape" so that a poem like "The Windhover" aims to depict not the bird
in general but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just
one interpretation to probably Hopkins' most studied poem and one which he
called his best.
http://www.bartleby.com/122/1000.html#12
During
his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of
Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems
on entering the priesthood, he had already sent some to Bridges who, with a few
other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years.
After Hopkins' death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow
poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected
edition. Currently, the largest collection of Hopkins's poems is held in the
Hopkins House at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.
Link: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins