Today is the birthday of the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this day in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England. Raised Anglican, in an artistic and prosperous home, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, and he decided to become a priest himself. He entered a Jesuit novitiate near London in 1867, and he vowed to “write no more…unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of his poetry and would not write poems again until 1875.

Nonetheless, when he began writing again, on the occasion of a shipwreck that took the lives of five Franciscan nuns, it was an outpouring unlike anything English language poetry had seen. His highly compressed, musical language introduced new aural affects, often using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Straining at the boundaries of sense, he pushed poetic language into the 20th Century.

For a full taste of Hopkin’s accomplishments, try the magnificent poem below – perhaps the first cri-de-coeur for environmental sensitivity in English Letters:

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew –
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being – slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

If the above piqued your interest, the Poetry Foundation website has more here on Gerard Manley Hopkins.