Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins ( born July 28, 1844 in Stratford in London, † June 8, 1889 in Dublin ) was a British poet and Jesuit priest, whose poems are admired mainly because of the liveliness of her expression.

Life

Hopkins was born in London, but his ancestors came from Wales. He was the son of an insurance agent and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he became a follower of Edward Bouverie Pusey and joined the Oxford Movement. In Oxford, his friendship with Robert Bridges, should have great importance for his development as a poet began. In 1866, he followed the example of Newman and converted to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1868 he entered the Jesuit order and waived seven years to compose it. In 1882 he became a teacher at Mount St. Mary's College and the Sheffield College Stoneyhurst Lancashire. Later, he was - as a priest - a professor of classical philology at the University College Dublin.

During his lifetime, Hopkins published any of his poems. Only through the efforts of his friend Bridges his collected poems were published in 1918. These include The Wreck of the Germany were (written in 1876, referring to the downfall of Germany ), The Windhover and Pied Beauty. Today he is one of the most admired poets of Great Britain. He died on 6 June 1889 in Dublin typhus.

The rediscovery of the sprung rhythm of English poetry

His historical significance, to a high degree on his innovations in poetic form.

Before Hopkins Middle English and modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure that descended from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeated groups of two or three syllables, the stressed syllable level at each repetition in the same place. Hopkins called this regular meter running rhythm. Although he wrote some early verses in the current rhythm, later he was fascinated by the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, whose most famous example of Beowulf. Hopkins called this rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. This jump rhythm based on Versfüßen with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four per metrical foot, with the emphasis always falls on the first syllable of a Versfußes.

For Hopkins the jump rhythm made ​​it possible to escape the uniformity of the current rhythm, poetry written in his view, it necessarily " lame and tame ," had to do. Many contemporary poets followed Hopkins' model, although most did not take over the jump rhythm, but traditional rhythmic structures in favor of free verse have ever abandoned.

His poetry underpinned Hopkins also mentally with the concepts of inscape ( Ingestalt ) and instress ( entry into force ), with which he tried to express that everything in God's creation has an individual form force and thus could attract every viewer into its spell. Central themes were for him nature and religion, God and man. The poems Hopkins' still impress with original neologisms, often dark metaphors, through conscious break of semantics and syntax, and above all by the novel metric of sprung rhythm.