Which poet coined the term "sprung rhythm"?

Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term “sprung rhythm.”

Hopkins, an English poet and Jesuit priest, developed sprung rhythm to imitate the patterns of natural speech. Unlike conventional English metres that often count a regular sequence of syllables, sprung rhythm places the main stress at the beginning of each foot and allows the number of following unstressed syllables to vary.

Hopkins described the technique in an 1877 letter and used it extensively in poems such as “Pied Beauty,” “God’s Grandeur,” and “The Windhover.” He believed this approach could preserve the force and flexibility of spoken English while avoiding what he considered the monotonous regularity of conventional “running rhythm.” His method drew inspiration from folk song, Shakespeare, Milton, and older English accentual traditions, including Anglo-Saxon verse.

The term is sometimes discussed cautiously because critics argue that Hopkins named or systematized rhythmic patterns that already existed in English poetry. That historical qualification does not make the quiz answer ambiguous: Hopkins is the poet conventionally credited with coining and developing the term.