Gerard Manley Hopkins

(1844 - 1889)

John Henry Newman received Gerard Manley Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, after the young man had read the cardinal’s account of his own conversion. Entering into the Jesuit novitiate two years later, Hopkins burned his youthful verse. His poetic silence lasted seven years, until, prompted by the drowning of five Franciscan nuns, he composed “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”