Gerard Manley Hopkins: Great Poet, Awful Teacher

At the Irish Times, Simon Edge remarks on Gerard Manley Hopkins's innovative verse and metrics, his woes while living in Ireland, and his inability to maintain control over a hostile brood of students. Edge begins by praising the wonderfully "Terrible" sonnets Hopkins composed on Irish soil: "Of the 28 poems he wrote in Ireland, the six known as the Terrible Sonnets are the most arresting. For anyone who has known depression, the gut-wrenchingly bleak No worst, there is none, which ends with the crumb of comfort that 'all life death does end and each day dies with sleep', is the poetic equivalent of Munch’s The Scream." We'll pick up from there:

In fairness, he had a genuinely awful time of it. In episodes I dramatise in my novel The Hopkins Conundrum, the unhappy soul who would eventually be recognised as a literary visionary arrived as Professor of Classics at University College Dublin in 1885. The Irish province of the Society of Jesus, which had taken over the running of the university, was dead against English Catholic converts joining their staff, so his appointment was bitterly contested. It was a bad start for a sensitive, frail creature who was already a misfit as on his own side of the Irish Sea.

The university itself was a sorry institution, operating out of a rat-infested building on the south side of St Stephen’s Green, bereft of books because the committee that gave the place to the Jesuits decided they wouldn’t need a library. Although he took his responsibilities seriously, Hopkins was a terrible teacher with no ability to control unruly students. When those students found out that the funny little man trying to teach them Latin and Greek was an English conservative with an Oxford accent and hopelessly hostile views on Home Rule, they made themselves as unruly as possible.

The eldest child of a London shipping insurer, he had converted to Catholicism after leaving Oxford and then joined the priesthood as a Jesuit. Without telling his superiors, he toiled privately for years composing verse in a radical system of metrics of his own devising. His most ambitious work, written in north Wales, was inspired by a shipwreck in the North Sea whose victims included five German nuns. Unfortunately, with its complicated syntax and unconventional form, The Wreck of the Deutschland baffled all who saw it and Hopkins’ attempts to get it published came to nothing.

Edge writes on to remind us that next year will be the centenary of the publication of the first collection of Hopkins's verse, by his friend Robert Bridges, the then poet laureate. Find out more at the Irish Times.