Biography Essay

Francis Thompson is best known for his ode "The Hound of Heaven" and for a short quatrain poem, "In No Strange Land" (or "The Kingdom of God"). Defying all cultural changes and literary reassessments, these two pieces have retained a place not only in British but in world literature, both as memorable poems and as expressions of religious thought and feeling at the deepest and most sincere levels. Though Thompson wrote a fairly large body of religious poetry, it is mainly these two remarkable achievements that have prompted such claims as John Davidson's that Thompson is "perhaps the greatest of English Roman Catholic poets of post- Reformation times." Today most readers would probably reserve such a title for Gerard Manley Hopkins. Nevertheless, such estimates of Thompson have often been rendered and ought to keep us from being too complacent about the usual designation of Thompson as...