Time at Oxford and Robert Bridges
In 1863 Hopkins moved to Balliol College, Oxford, where he lived for four years while he studied classics. Amongst his professors was the famous aesthetic author Walter Pater. During his Oxford years Hopkins learned about the Oxford Movement, which would be instrumental in making him question his Anglicanism and would, eventually, lead to his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 and his decision to enter the Society of Jesus in 1868.
During his Oxford years, Hopkins read extensively. John Keats and Christina Rossetti, for example, were amongst his favorite authors. And he also wrote extensively. Not many of his poems survive, however, as Hopkins burned all his manuscripts after deciding to devout his life to God and become a Jesuit in 1868. An exception is the poem The Habit of Perfection which survives to this day.
Among the friendships Hopkins’ formed during his Oxford years none would be as important and influential as that of Robert Bridges who would become Poet Laureate in 1913. You can learn more about Bridges’ work and life at the Poetry Foundation, The Victorian Web, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can find an example of Bridges’ early work below: the Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal, which he published (with little success) in 1899.
As explained in the section Poems, Bridges is responsible for bringing Hopkins’ poetry to the wider reading public, as Hopkins himself never published during his lifetime. After Hopkins’ death in 1889, Bridges toyed for years with the possibility of compiling and publishing his friends’ work, a project which would see the light in 1918 with the publication of the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.