Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Victorian English poet and Jesuit priest who is now regarded as one of the most innovative and influential poets of the nineteenth century, though he was virtually unknown during his lifetime. Born in 1844, Hopkins developed a revolutionary poetic technique he called sprung rhythm, which broke free from conventional metre to capture the natural rhythms of speech and the dynamic energy of the natural world. The Great Poets collection presents his finest work, including celebrated poems such as The Windhover, Pied Beauty, God's Grandeur and The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins's poetry is characterised by its intense observation of nature, its spiritual fervour and its extraordinary compression and inventiveness of language. His work was not published until 1918, nearly thirty years after his death in 1889, but has since influenced poets from Dylan Thomas to Seamus Heaney. His audiobooks and books bring his extraordinary verse to new audiences.