Poet and Critic

To the reader acquainted only with his poetry, this selection should make it clear that Gerard Manley Hopkins was also a highly intelligent and clear-sighted critic. Today the use of speech rhythm in verse is commonly accepted; but such a practice in the nineteenth-century, when most verse was monotonously regular, showed a critical insight not subjugated by climate of opinion. Much of Hopkins’s correspondence selected in this volume discusses the intricacies of verse structure or musical theory; but when he touches on contemporary prose or poetry, his criticism is often extremely acute. He writes thus to Coventry Patmore:

There is an old Adam of barbarism, boyishness, wildness, rawness, rankness, the disreputable, the unrefined in the refined and educated. It is that I meant by tykishness (a tyke is a stray, sly, unowned dog), and said you have none of; and I did also think that you were without all sympathy for it and must survey it when you met with it wholly from without . . . I thought it was as well to have ever so little of it . . .

There Hopkins plants his finger, with great delicacy, upon the main weakness of Patmore’s work. The keynote of Hopkins’s correspondence with Patmore, Bridges and Canon Dixon, is one of passionate accuracy. He encourages warmly, listens with patience; but one feels he would rather be boiled alive than create a false impression. The same honesty informs his nature notebooks, where carefully and lovingly he interprets the ‘inscape’ of cloud, rock, waterfall and tree. How far the poet in Hopkins was at war with the Jesuit one cannot say, despite Mr Pick’s penetrating Introduction; but these pages reveal plainly that for him a natural order not governed by supernatural order was unthinkable.

1954 (84)