Gerard Manley Hopkins is a rewarding and exacting poet, one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. His style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries. Without having detailed knowledge of his life, beliefs and any other context, we can read his poetry with great pleasure. Through his love and study of nature, his doctrinal beliefs, and his technical innovations, Hopkins becomes a greater and more rewarding artist. In prose and poetry he closely observes and records nature, thus developing a language to describe what he perceives: terms such as "inscape" and "instress". Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay All of Hopkins' poems have as their immediate intention to show the particularity of an object at a moment in time, and he coined the word "inscape" to convey this idea. He developed a poetic language and a new rhythm, called "Sprung Rhythm". It is a meter in which the number of stresses in a line is a given but the number of syllables does not matter, thus allowing the poet to vary the speed of the lines so as to capture the life of the poem. In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways to rejuvenate poetic language. He regularly placed familiar words in a new and surprising context. His early verse had celebrated natural beauty in a way reminiscent of Keats, but when, after converting to Roman Catholicism, he decided to become a Jesuit priest, he stopped writing poetry as a worldly matter. worry. It allows Hopkins to approach the rhythms of natural language: indeed, one of Hopkins's early supporters, the critic F. R. Leavis, argued that Hopkins was the only English poet who rivaled Shakespeare for his poetic imitation of natural language. His doctrinal beliefs also influenced his poetic innovation. It's not just the fact that he became a Catholic, a Jesuit and a priest. He was also deeply devoted to Mary as the mother of God and to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He was deeply moved by the idea that the incarnation, Christ coming as man to share humanity and suffer, was part of a great plan of salvation, preceding the creation of the world. He was strongly influenced by Christian beliefs and this belief influenced his poetic innovation. The concept of nature and self-care was very significant to the Victorians. Like his contemporaries, Hopkins was also puzzled by the Victorian quest to understand the idea of ​​self in relation to the new revelation of nature. However, Hopkins was strengthened by his Christian faith in his artistic pursuit, unlike his contemporaries. There is a metaphysical awakening in the religious poetry of Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell; some of Hopkins' Catholic contemporaries. But none of these poets were able to make an impact on society or influence poetry in general. It is Hopkins alone who succeeds in his effort to usher in a new era of religious poetry after the seventeenth century. As Hopkins' poetry became praise and worship an extension of his spiritual quest. And his spiritual journey continued to find expression through the religious poems written throughout his short life. One of the important concepts of his poems is that nature meditates between itself and God. It finds a flow of energy between God, nature and man. Nature, therefore, lies between God and the self of man. Throughout Hopkins's poetry there is a triangular system of relationships; the poet reacts to his argument, which leads him to God. "The Windhover", written in 1887 (the best.