GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

Garrison Keillor reminds us that....

It's the birthday of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, (books by this author) born in Stratford, England (1844). His parents were Anglicans, and they were horrified when Hopkins informed them that he was converting to Catholicism. So he went into a kind of exile, joined the Jesuits, and traveled to rural Wales to be ordained as a priest. Those months in Wales would be one of the happiest periods of his life. He especially loved the beautiful rural landscape. It was while he was there, in 1877, preparing for his ordination, that he wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered today, poems like "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), and "The Starlight Night" (1877). He wrote in his diary at the time, "This world is ... a book [God] has written ... a poem of beauty."

But after his ordination, the Jesuits sent him to teach the poor children of industrial cities in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hopkins had looked forward to a life of hard work and sacrifice, but he had no idea how much he would hate living in these polluted, ugly cities. In a letter in 1878 he wrote, "Life here is as dank as ditch-water. ... My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air."

He wrote less and less, and finally, at the age of forty-four, he died from typhoid, which he'd caught from the polluted water in Dublin. His poetry might never have been remembered, since he published very little of it, except that he had kept up a lifelong correspondence with a friend from college, the poet Robert Bridges. Hopkins had sent Bridges many of his poems, and after Hopkins's death, Bridges began to publish Hopkins's poetry. In 1918, Bridges edited the first Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It wasn't until 1930, when a second edition of Hopkins's poems was published, that people began to recognize that he was one of the greatest poets of his generation.