ABSTRACT
Oxford, 1936, pp. 39–40
Yeats, three years from death, was only moderately sympathetic towards modern poets. He included seven of Hopkins’s more immediately attractive poems in this anthology, which Auden later called ‘the most deplorable volume ever issued’ by its publishers (quoted in Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain, New York, 1967, p. 118). Ellmann points out that Yeats regarded the Introduction as a manifesto of his doubts about modern poetry.
It should be recalled that Yeats had been friendly with Bridges, and had also spoken to Hopkins in Dublin, but he could not have known that, in November 1886, Hopkins had written to Patmore criticizing the ‘strained and unworkable allegory’ of ‘Mosada’, an early poem by Yeats (Further Letters, p. 374).
