The artistic principles of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has long been accorded an honorable place among the English Poets of the last century. But until recently his value as a critic went unrecognized. With the full publication of his writings, however, there has been an increasing respect for his pungently expressed comments on his contemporaries. One critic has advisedly pointed out that from his letters “one could extract a handbook of critical aphorisms worth more to those who are now writing, than imitative study of what was peculiar in Hopkin’s verse,”. W. H. Gardner, perhaps the most balanced and thorough of Hopkins’s critics, after a careful consideration of the poet’s critical analyses, maintains: “To sum up, Hopkins’s critical remarks with their vigorous style and constant preoccupation with definite ethical and aesthetic standards, frequently reminds us of the honest and trenchant manner of Dr. Johnson ... Though he could at times be harsh and hypercritical, Hopkins’s taste was more catholic, his perception more versatile than that of Johnson, who had not enjoyed the advantage of early enlightenment at the feet of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. With Hopkins as with Johnson, however, it is usually difficult if not dangerous to disagree; in either case, disagreement always entails an exhilarating mental exercise, a salutary revision and reaffirmation of our own principles.