English poet and Jesuit priest whose work, almost none of it published in his lifetime, became — when Robert Bridges issued the Poems in 1918, twenty-nine years after Hopkins's death — one of the founding events of modernist poetry in English. Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus in 1868 and burned his early verse on the conviction that poetry was incompatible with his vocation. He returned to writing in 1875 with "The Wreck of the Deutschland," a long ode prompted by the drowning of five Franciscan nuns fleeing the Falk Laws, and continued in private until his death from typhoid fever in Dublin at forty-four.
The poetics rests on two terms Hopkins worked out for himself: inscape (the distinctive inner form of a thing — the particular pattern that makes it itself) and instress (the energy by which inscape is held in being and by which the perceiving mind grasps it). Both owe something to the medieval theology of Duns Scotus, whose principle of haecceitas — "thisness" — Hopkins discovered with delight in 1872. The verse is built on what he called sprung rhythm: lines counted by stresses rather than syllables, allowing irregular numbers of unstressed syllables between accents and producing a tightly compressed, percussive line unlike anything in Victorian English.
The "terrible sonnets" of 1885 — written in Dublin in a state of deep spiritual desolation — are among the most concentrated religious poems in English: "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day"; "No worst, there is none"; "My own heart let me more have pity on." They record a believer's experience of God's withdrawal, in language that does not soften the experience or conclude it.
Seamus Heaney named Hopkins as a central early influence; his presence in Eliot, in Dylan Thomas, in Geoffrey Hill, in much of twentieth-century religious lyric, is fundamental.