I first met Gerard Manley Hopkins when I was 18, living in a hostel in West Bromwich. I was there as a community service volunteer for eight months between leaving school and starting university. I had recently split up with my girlfriend. I knew nobody at all in the area. I was desperately lonely. One evening I stood for a while, looking over the edge of a motorway bridge, wondering what it would be like to jump off.

Someone – I wish I could remember who – gave me a copy of Robert Bridge's selection of Hopkins’ poetry, and there I found poem 41:

These one hundred and twenty-six words resonated so strongly with me, not for any hope they offered (though as we shall see, there may be a little hidden in here), but because I’d found somebody else who felt like I did, had been there himself, was talking my language, who had experienced and shared my anguish and distress, my sense of devastating emptiness. Alongside frequent late-night listenings to the final adagio lamentoso from Tchaikovsky's Symphonie Pathétique, with its fading into nothingness, Hopkins’ poem somehow kept me going. I owe him a lifelong debt of gratitude.

He has been my frequent companion, sometimes haunting but more often inspiring me, ever since. He regularly finds his way into my writings and lectures, including my contribution to Josie Billington's Reading and Mental Health; and my related series of blogposts on ‘sonnet therapy’ in which I propose a course of six of his sonnets as guides on a journey from despair to delight.