100 Heroes: Gerard Manley Hopkins
The gay man who became of the world's leading poets.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among the leading English poets. He was seen as an innovator in the form in which he wrote poems.
It was only after his poems were published in anthologies - after his death - that Hopkins began to be recognised as a leading voice.
Significant relationships appear to have included Digby Mackworth Dolben - they met at Oxford in 1865, Dolben was 17 at the time.
According to entries in his private journal, Hopkins became erotically obsessed with Dolben.
Dolben appears to have been an ongoing point of moral confusion for Hopkins. He wrote erotic poems that were dedicated to Dolben, but was also forbidden by his religious mentor from seeing Dolben.
Dolben drowned in 1867 and Hopkins was distraught by the death.
Literary commentators have noted that many of Hopkins's best poems feature elegiac longing for Dolben.
Born in 1844, Hopkins died in 1889.