Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English Jesuit priest and writer of highly individualistic poetry, which proved very influential to modernist writers in the early 20th century. Hopkins was born in 1844 in Stratford, Essex to an Anglican family. He studied at Oxford, writing poetry whilst studying the classics. In 1866 he came under the influence of (later Cardinal) Newman and the Oxford Movement, which revived interest in the relationship between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, and he was received into the Catholic Church. He left Oxford with a distinguished academic record and decided to become a 
Jesuit novitate, burning his youthful verses. In 1874, he went to St. Beuno's College in North Wales to study theology where he learned Welsh and began writing poetry again. "The Wreck of the Deutschland", an ode about the wreck of a ship in which five exiled nuns were drowned, was rejected by a Jesuit magazine in 1875. After ordination in 1877, Hopkins served as a parish priest and teacher in London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. In 1884, he was appointed professor of Greek literature at University College, Dublin, but he found the environment disagreeable, and he was overworked and unwell. Despite the encouragement of his friends, he did not publish much of his poetry, believing it to be out of keeping with his vocation and liable to be misunderstood. Hopkins died of typhoid fever in Dublin in 1889.
Robert Bridges posthumously published a few of his mature poems in anthologies and a collected edition in 1918. The second edition of 1930 established Hopkins’s work as among the most innovative and significant of his century; later to inspire T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. Philosophically Hopkins was influenced by the medieval Franciscan thinker Duns Scotus, stressing the individuality of every natural thing, thus there was an innate “selfness” within every sensuous imprint. His “terrible sonnets”, including "Carrion Comfort" express a sense of despair, artistic frustration and religious sterility. There is a tension between religious vocation and his delight in the world of the senses and his desire to articulate it. Another of his most notable works is "The Windhover". For these he invented his own metric system called sprung rhythm in which lines have a given number of stresses but the number and placement of unstressed syllables is variable. He argued that this was the natural rhythm of common speech and written prose.
In the Romantic tradition with regard to nature and akin to Browning in following the mind’s arguments and patterns, Hopkins criticised Tennyson for using the grand poetic style and instead employed a new mannerism, characteristic of the latter part of the century, which emphasised the portrayal of psychological complexity and elaborate aesthetics. Using alliteration and repetition, Hopkins employed the verbal subtleties and music of language to communicate deep personal feelings, including his understanding of God and his delight in the creative and unusual. He also wrote music compositions and drew.