One of the most important events in the life of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, an event that shaped his life and colored his poetry, was his religious conversion while attending Oxford University. A number of factors converged in his decision to switch affiliations. He first came under the sway of the Anglican High Church and the Oxford Movement and then was influenced by the great Catholic John Henry Newman. It was clear he was searching for a deep religious experience and was uncertain where to find it:
From its first stirrings in him, Hopkins's quest for oneness was a spiritual odyssey and adventure. Philosophy took its place there at his side but only as a ready squire to aid and support the Christian knight setting forth "to conquer the whole country."
He finally became convinced of the Catholic position in July of 1966 and was received into the Roman Church by Newman in October of that year.
One of the primary influences on Hopkins at Oxford was Henry Liddon, a priest in the Church of England. Liddon was one of the most popular men at Oxford, and many of those who came to his services were High Church enthusiasts like Hopkins. In time, though, Liddon's charm wore thin for Hopkins. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England was the direct descendant of the Oxford Movement, and it had changed considerably from its immediate ancestor. Two decades before, tracts ere issued by the Oxford Movement, frightening all of England with the prospect of a deep division in the Church. John Henry Newman had gone over to Catholicism in 1845, and only E.B. Pusey was still at Oxford. The movement was still alive, but it was less important intellectually in the time of Hopkins than it had been 20 years before:
To hostile observers in the 1860s it seemed that the energy of the Tractarians that had once gone into reaffirming the continuity of the Church from the days of the Apostles to the present had diminished into a pue...