Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was one of England’s greatest Nature poets. At his death, nobody knew just how remarkable his poetry was. Even the few poets who engaged with his work tended to see only bizarre eccentricity and intractable difficulty. It took over three decades for his genius to be fully grasped, but as soon as his daring originality was recognised, it had a dramatic influence eclipsing, for a time, all other Victorian poets. Even now, the poetry of Hopkins is invariably seen as surpassing that of all of his more famous contemporaries.
In what did his genius exist? It had ...
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