Gerard Hopkins and His Influence

In the summer term of 1890, when I was half-way through my time at Oxford, I was invited by the President of my College and his wife (Margaret L. Woods, the poet and novelist), to dine and meet Robert Bridges, whose name I then heard for the first time. The President had a cottage on Boar's Hill, the only house then existing on that heathy ridge which has since become thick-sown with the dwellings of dons and poets. We dined at this cottage and walked down after dinner to Oxford in the midsummer twilight. Bridges impressed at first sight by his splendid presence, his lean stature, handsome features, thick black hair and beard, and leonine eye. In talk he was friendly and encouraging. Before parting, he and his wife asked me to stay for a night at their home, an eighteenth-century manor-house at Yattendon village in Berkshire. There we had much talk on poetry; and in the evening Bridges brought out and read me some poems by his friend Gerard Hopkins, who had died the year before, and who, Bridges said, had invented a new prosody for English verse, a prosody which he himself had experimented in. Among the poems I then heard were one or two of the “tragic” sonnets, which greatly impressed me. Manifestly this unknown poet who had never published was a poet of extraordinary originality, utterly unlike any other. I did not see at this time examples of Hopkins' more difficult manner, which I probably should not have appreciated. I was especially interested by his new prosody; it seemed to promise scope for fresh effects and for admitting a fresh kind of matter into verse; and very soon I ventured on experiments in it myself.