Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 in Essex, England. He studied Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, between the years 1863-7, where he struck up a significant life-long friendship with Robert Bridges (the eventual Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom). He held a regular correspondence with Bridges throughout his lifetime in which the two friends discussed Hopkins' poetry in great detail. Influences Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864. During his years at Oxford he studied with the prestigious critic Walter Pater, who first tutored him in 1866 and who remained a friend of Hopkins until he left Oxford in September 1879. Hopkins was a committed Christian, and began his novitiate in the Society of Jesus at Manresa House in Roehampton, September 1868. Two years later he moved to St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Despite his love for writing and poetry, Hopkins vowed to 'write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors'. He burnt all of the poetry he had written thus far, and would not write...