biography
| name: |
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1844–89)
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| biography:
| Poet, born in Stratford, E London, UK. He studied at Oxford where, influenced by the Oxford Movement, he became a Catholic in 1866. He studied for the priesthood with the Jesuits in North Wales, absorbing the language and poetry of the region; he was ordained in 1877, and became professor of Greek at Dublin (1884). There he wrote his profoundly tragic ‘Dark Sonnets’, which express his sense of exile, spiritual aridity, and artistic frustration. None of his poems was published in his lifetime. His friend and literary executor, Robert Bridges, published an edition in 1918, which was given a very mixed reception, notably to Hopkins' skilful experiments with ‘sprung rhythm’; but a new and expanded edition in 1930 established him as a major poet in the English language, and his work became influential. His best-known poems include ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘The Windhover’. |
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