ABSTRACT
Vol. 8, London, 1893, pp. 161–4
Miles’s anthology of the major and minor poets of the nineteenth century eventually filled ten stocky volumes and is still valuable reading for students of late Victorian taste in poetry. Bridges claimed that he used his influence with the editor in order to publish this first significant selection from Hopkins’s work, which, as with the other poets, was preceded by a biographical and critical introduction. It was a major step in his campaign to bring Hopkins gradually to public notice.
These were the poems on which most readers based their assessment of Hopkins until the Spirit of Man (1916); Charles Williams, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Roger Fry all said they first read Hopkins in Miles (Mellown, Modern Philology, November 1959, p. 95). The poems were: ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ (part), ‘The Habit of Perfection’, ‘The Starlight Night’, ‘Spring’, ‘The Candle Indoors’, ‘Spring and Fall’, ‘Inversnaid’, ‘To R.B.’ Bridges also used his introduction to the Hopkins selection, reproduced here, to quote from four more poems (but nothing, predictably, from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’).
This brief account of Hopkins’s life and work fulfils the requirements of what Bridges described to Mrs Hopkins in 1890 as a short preface which ‘should put the poems out of reach of criticism’. Bridges’s tendency, therefore, to dwell on Hopkins’s ‘faults’, both here and in the Preface to the Notes of the Poems (1918), may partly be explained as a strategy to disarm public criticism.
