Gerard Manley Hopkins: the poet priest who deserves a place in the gay canon

Wrestling with his desires while committed to Jesuit celibacy left poetry as the only outlet for Hopkins’s sexuality, which rings with pent-up passion

Fun literary fact: when a Jesuit priest called Father Gerard Hopkins wrote a long, experimental poem about a shipwreck in the Thames estuary in 1876, he sent it to his order’s journal the Month, which he thought might publish it. He was wrong about that. However, in the very edition where he had hoped to see his own work, there was a short poem by a young Oxford student identified only as OFO’FWW. Trivia buffs will know those initials: this was the young Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’s first published work.

It feels like a historical oddity because the pair are otherwise so incongruous: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as we now call him, was small, pious and serious, living a life of obedience in the strictest of the Catholic orders after his conversion to the faith. Wilde was by contrast large, debauched and flippant, dazzling the smartest salons and heading for a terrible fall. That they nearly rubbed pages in a Jesuit journal was probably as close as they were ever going to come.

Related: Poem of the week: The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins