Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English Jesuit priest and poet whose posthumously published verse revolutionized 20th-century poetry. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, under Walter Pater, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 under the influence of John Henry Newman and entered the Society of Jesus, burning his early poems to embrace religious self-abnegation.

Encouraged to resume writing by his religious superior, Hopkins developed 'sprung rhythm'—a metrical innovation based on natural English speech stresses rather than rigid syllable counting—and the theological concepts of inscape (the unique inner divine design of every entity) and instress. In masterworks like The Wreck of the Deutschland, 'The Windhover', 'Pied Beauty', and the searing 'Terrible Sonnets', he pushed English syntax to ecstatic and tortured expressive limits.