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Gerard Manley Hopkins
Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28,
1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one
the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised
in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended
college in Oxford in 1863, and studied Classics.
In 1866, Hopkins was received into the Roman
Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to
become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered
a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he
vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the
wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the
poetry he had written to date and would not
write poems again until 1875. He spent nine
In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the
Royal University College in Dublin. He died five
years later from typhoid fever. Although his
poems were never published during his lifetime,
his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume
of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.
Never saw his work published
 Is considered the most innovative of
the Victorian poets
 Very difficult to get along with.
 Came up with the idea of inscapeeach being in the universe enacts its
identity.
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 The
individually distinctive inner
structure or nature of a thing.
 Man is the most “selved” being
in the universe and thus
recognizes the inscape of other
beings (the act of instress).
the inscape in
others leads one to God,
because the inscape is a divine
creation.
 Poetry was a celebration of
inscape by capturing the
 Recognizing
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In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two
terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause
some confusion. By "inscape" he means the
unified complex of characteristics that give each
thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it
from other things, and by "instress" he means
either the force of being which holds the inscape
together or the impulse from the inscape which
carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:
There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape
markedly holding its most simple and beautiful
oneness up from the ground through a graceful
swerve below (I think) the spring of the
branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the
 Lines
have a set number of
stresses, but the placement is
varied
Lóok at the stárs! Lóok! Look úp at the skíes!
O lóok at all the fíre- fólk sítting in the áir
The bríght bóroughs, the círcle- cítadels thére!
Dówn in the dím woods the díamond délves!
The élves eyes!