ABSTRACT
Gerard. Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was born in the same year as his friend, Robert Bridges, who became the English Poet Laureate. It was owing to this friendship that Hopkins’s book of poems was published many years after the author’s death. He came of middle- class stock we are told. The most significant events in his life, apart from the writing of his poems, were his conversion to the Catholic Church in 1866 and his ordination to the priesthood in 1877. His poetry was highly experimental and could hardly be appreciated before the twentieth century. His reflections in this letter to Robert Bridges are those of one radical experimentalist upon another and are therefore of the highest interest and significance. We should note that Whitman, with all of his strenuous efforts at publicizing himself and his work (which may be what Hopkins is alluding to in calling him a scoundrel), did not succeed in achieving general recognition sooner than his more retiring contemporaries, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson. Real fame came to all three around the time of the First World War, the traumatic shock of which may have impelled humanity to take stock of itself and the worth of its intellectual productions during the preceding century. Concerning Hopkins’s own technical explorations, Herbert Read has written:
His originality … is both verbal and metrical, and perhaps the innovations he introduced into metre prevent more than anything else the appreciation of his poetry. Except for a few early poems, which need not be taken into account, practically every poem written by Hopkins presents rhythmical irregularities. The poet himself attempted a theoretical justification of these, and it is an extremely ingenious piece of work…
The sophistication of Hopkins’s prosodic theory, whether or not it is a rationalization of the intuitive practice prompted by his own genius (as Read surmises) deserves the close attention and reflection of every student of poetry in general and of Whitman in particular.
