Gerald Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins first presents the poet as a talented and sensitive young man whose early work shows characteristic signs of influence from the 19th-century poets he admired. At Oxford his religious tendencies came to dominate the creative, and he became a Catholic and later entered the Society of Jesus, despite his family's opposition and the unsympathetic atmosphere towards Catholics which was still the case in the mid-Victorian period.

The book then plots his career as a Jesuit, through nine years of training, when the poetry which he had given up voluntarily on joining the Society re-emerged in original fashion in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. But disappointed in his hopes of publication in a Jesuit journal, he henceforth contented himself with showing his work to his friends, notably the sometimes disapproving eye of the later Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges.

The mainly joyful poetry written at St Beuno's is eventually quelled by the hurly-burly of parish work into which Hopkins was flung by his superiors. The poetry and prose becomes more desperate, culminating in the near-suicidal outpourings in Dublin, where, as a patriotic Englishman, he was required to teach classics in the troubled atmosphere of agitation for Irish Home Rule. It is a story of worldly failure, and creative and spiritual achievement.