Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) grew up in a political and poetical family. His father was a poet who had served as the British consul general in Hawaii. Hopkins attended Oxford University and was attracted to the ideas of the Oxford Movement, which, in response to the increased skepticism of the age, attempted to connect the Anglican Church to the tenets and rituals of the early Christian church. Like John Henry Newman, one of the founders of the Oxford Movement, Hopkins found himself unable to resist the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church was the true heir of early Christianity, and he converted to Catholicism. In 1868 he joined the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, and in 1877 he was ordained a priest, after which he burned the poetry he had written as a youth, considering it unworthy of his high vocation. Although some of his superiors encouraged him to resume writing poetry, one of his most ambitious poems, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," about a shipwreck in which five nuns were drowned, was not accepted for publication by the Jesuit periodical to which he submitted it. Few of Hopkins's poems were published during his lifetime because most readers could not understand their unusual words, highly compressed images, and odd rhythms. This poetry is among the most beautiful but also among the oddest in the English language. Its conciseness of expression and unconventional rhythm have strongly influenced a number of twentieth-century poets.