“Admire and Do Otherwise”

Gerard Manley Hopkins had a powerful impact on Ivor Gurney, who had poems by Hopkins with him in the WWI trenches. Gurney epitomizes the dramatic change from nineteenth-century poetry to Modernism, and this change was fundamentally influenced by the example of Hopkins. While Gurney did not mimic Hopkins’s mannerisms or take on his themes, from Hopkins he learned to harness and hold expansive energy within his own eccentric forms. In so doing, Gurney set a pattern for later writers responding to Hopkins.