When the young English Jesuit novitiate Gerard Manley Hopkins submitted his poem The Wreck of the Deutschland to the Jesuit magazine The Month, the editors accepted the unusual thirty-five stanza piece, then reversed their decision. Though Hopkins was later invited to teach Greek and Latin at University College Dublin, he found the experience overwhelming and discouraging, the climate unwelcoming to his frail health. When he died in Ireland of typhoid fever in 1889 at the age of 44, his mature poetry had yet to be published. “I am so happy… I am so happy. I loved my life,” were his last words.
For a technocratic, results-driven age like our own, those words don’t quite compute. Perhaps, we might admit, Hopkins might have taken satisfaction in serving in the halls of academia; but, then, again, he taught Greek and Latin, which, beyond not being particularly “practical,” are now accused of perpetuating white supremacy. Though Hopkins’s corpus is now widely taught in undergraduate poetry programs, he did not live to savor that success. He perished more or less in obscurity, his literary legacy largely rescued by his (non-Catholic) friend Robert Bridges.
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