Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Written by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Narrated by Denis Daly

Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins


Narrated by Denis Daly


During his lifetime, Hopkins, who was ordained as a Jesuit priest, was best known as a scholar and a teacher of languages. In his youth he composed poetry prolifically, but detroyed all his juvenile work in 1867. In 1874 he commenced writing poetry again, but little of his verse was published in his lifetime. His work was rescued from obscurity by his friend and supporter, Robert Bridges, who later became poet laureate.


Hopkins' reputation as a ground breaking poet developed rapidly after Bridges published a collection of Hopkins' verse in 1918. Today he is considered to be one of the most innovative poets of the Nineteenth Century and a major influence on such important figures as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden.


Hopkin's verse is notable for its striking imagery and use of a unique rolling metrical structure, which he called sprung rhythm. Many of the themes in his poems are drawn from associations with the pentitential religious practices to which he regularly subjected himself, and the tone of many of his best known works is introspective and melancholy.


Production copyright 2021 Voices of Today

• Language: English
• Publisher: Voices of Today
• Release date: May 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953007414

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Born in England in 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins began writing poetry at an early age. In his early twenties, Hopkins converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism and in 1868 joined the Society of Jesuits. Hopkins continued to write poems thereafter, while serving as a priest and university teacher, but he burned most of his early poems out of a deep sense of conflict between his art and his faith, and he published very little in his lifetime."God's Grandeur" appeared in the first collection of his poems, edited by his friend Robert Bridges and published in 1918, long after the poet's death in 1889.