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Gerard Manley Hopkins |
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an innovative poet who trained as a Jesuit priest, but at the end of his life he felt he had failed in both worlds. He grew up delighting in verse and in the joyful, sensuous life it seemed to evoke. But when the time came to join the church he threw his poems into a bonfire, believing they violated his vow of humility. Seven years later, studying for ordination in Wales, he was encouraged by his supervisor to write again, and he began producing the best poems of his life.
But in the industrial towns of England, the work of a young priest and the sadness of the smoky mill life depressed him. His final assignment, teaching Greek at the University College Dublin, left him even gloomier. He didn’t like the city. He wrote little, contracted typhoid fever from the polluted water, and died at forty-five.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |