Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was a British poet. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 under the influence of John Henry Newman. In 1868 he joined the Jesuit order. His early training in drawing informed his precise visual sense, although he initially hoped to become a painter. Hopkins published none of his poems during his lifetime. After his death from typhus, his friend Robert Bridges published his Collected Poems for the first time in 1918.