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Hello group members! This is where we'll create out riveting page……

This is him...what a fox Some facts about this riveting man.... Our boy Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844. He was the first of nine children born to Manley and Catherine Hopkins. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College on scholarship from 1863-1867, where he earned first-class degrees in Classics and Greats. After being influenced by John Henry Newman's //Apologia pro via sua,// Hopkins decided to enter the priesthood and entered a Jesuit novitiate near London in 1867. At that time, he vowed to “write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date. The writings of Duns Scotus allowed him to consider the idea that his poetry might not necessarily conflict with Jesuit principles. Scotus (1265-1308), a medieval Catholic thinker, argued that individual and particular objects in this world were the only things that man could know directly, and then only through the haecceitas ("thisness") of each object. He studied theology in North Wales in 1874 and later adapted Welsh poetic rhythm to fit his own work. In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the //Deutschland//, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” introduced what Hopkins called “**sprung rhythm,**” a result of his knowledge of Welsh language and poetry. By not limiting the number of “slack” or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England and was ordained in 1877. For the next seven years Hopkins carried out his duties teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and Stonyhurst. He found the work stimulating, but rather exhausting. His appointment in 1884 as Professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin, left him in prolonged depression. This resulted partly from the examination papers he had to read as Fellow in Classics for the Royal University of Ireland. The exams occured five or six times a year, might produce 500 papers, each one several pages of mostly uninspired student translations (in 1885 there were 631 failures to 1213 passes). More important, however, was his sense that his prayers no longer reached God; and this doubt produced the "terrible" sonnets. Still, his last words as he lay dying on June 8, 1889, were, "I am happy, so happy." He died of Typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins’ //Poems// that first appeared in 1918. Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language and regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound and unusual word combinations. [|http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/gerard-manley-Hopkins] []

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 * Sprung Rhythm:** a complex and very technically involved system of metrics which Hopkins derived partly from his knowledge of Welsh poetry. It is opposed specifically to "running" or "common" rhythm, and provides for feet of lengths varying from one syllable to four, with either "rising" or "falling" rhythm.