Although the English author and Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote no more than 40 mature poems, he is regarded as one of the major English poets.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born at Stratford, Essex, on July 28, 1844, into a talented family which encouraged his artistic nature. In 1854 he entered Highgate School, where he distinguished himself as a gifted student and began to write Keatsian nature poetry. At the age of 19 he entered Balliol College, Oxford University. Hopkins's undergraduate letters, notebooks, and sketchbooks reveal his intelligence, sensitivity, and sensuous response to natural beauty. Yet he was physically delicate and revealed an ascetic tendency, a strongwilled desire to curb his passionate and egotistic spirit. At Highgate, for example, he once went a week without drinking any liquids, and at Oxford during Lent he allowed himself "no tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar."

In 1864 Hopkins was deeply...