Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins burned his early poems when he became a Jesuit priest, believing poetry incompatible with his vocation — he called it "the slaughter of the innocents." Seven years later, moved by a shipwreck that drowned five nuns, he began again, and in secret wrote some of the most original verse of the nineteenth century.

His "sprung rhythm" and compound coinages ("dapple-dawn-drawn," "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls") sounded like nothing else in Victorian England — so almost nothing was published in his lifetime. His friend Robert Bridges finally brought out the Poems in 1918, twenty-nine years after Hopkins died, and the modernists received him as a contemporary.

"Pied Beauty" remains the great thanksgiving for imperfect things: "Glory be to God for dappled things."