Inspirational Quotes by Gerard Manley Hopkins (English Poet)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was an English poet. A Jesuit priest since 1868, he was one of the most individual Victorian writers. His work deals with religious themes and evokes imagery from nature. However, it was not published in collected form until 1918, but it influenced many leading 20th-century poets.

Born in Stratford, Essex, Hopkins was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College-Oxford, where he was a pupil of theologian Benjamin Jowett and The literary critic Walter Pater and a disciple of cleric Edward Pusey, and met his lifelong friend Robert Bridges. Following John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, Hopkins was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1877.

Hopkins taught at Stoneyhurst (1882–84) and became a professor of Greek at University College, Dublin (1884.) He wrote little poetry until 1876, when a shipwreck inspired him to write his best-known poems, including ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1876,) ‘The Windhover’ and ‘Pied Beauty’ (both 1877,) in which he used what he called ‘sprung rhythm.’ None of his poems was published in his lifetime, but his friend Bridges brought out a complete edition in 1918.

Alison G Sulloway wrote the appraisal Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (1972.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Up above, what wind walks! What lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds has wilder, wilful, wavier, meal-drift molded over and melted across skies!
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Topics: Nature

Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Topics: Education, Colleges, Universities

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Topics: Spring, Seasons

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 so 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.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Topics: Wilderness

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Inspirational Quotes by Gerard Manley Hopkins (English Poet)

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