"Virtually unknown in his own lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet and Jesuit priest, has - in the course of the past seventy-five years - become recognized as one of the world's foremost poets, his works known and admired by untold thousands of readers. Like the Psalms, his poems cover the entire range of human emotions, from the sheer celebration of the world to the terrors of desolation." "Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet and biographer, here gives us a portrait forty years in the making of this brilliant and extraordinary man and poet. At each step of Hopkins's life - from his years with his large, well-to-do Victorian family in London to his years of study at Oxford in the 1860s, to the travail of his conversion, through his years of grinding study to become a Jesuit, through the writing of his groundbreaking ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland, and on through his years of intense introspection, meditation, and brilliant preaching and teaching which yielded so many unforgettable sonnets, Mariani shows us a man who always insisted on probing deeper into the mystery of God. In this scintillating analysis of Hopkins's poetry and his life, Mariani reveals for us the rich and poignant story of a great poet and that rare thing: a good man whose life and words continue to touch and inspire us."--Jacket.