On a walking tour in 1866, just before his conversion, Hopkins visited Tintern Abbey, and paid it the highest compliment he could think of by saying it reminded him of the architecture of Butterfield, designer of Keble College. When we say X has no sense of humour it means he has one different from our own, but Hopkins's idea of fun is very Victorian, very religious, very remote indeed. It certainly did not include Butterfield, or belief. But when rediscovered in the 1920s and 30s, he seemed so amazingly of our time, and his poetry almost a necessary part of Modernism, that its obvious roots in Victorian Gothic looked hardly relevant. Since then, its popularity has been canonised and its complexities have found a firm niche in the Eng Lit curricula. To read the poems in youth is still an intoxicating experience, for he is very much a young person's poet: but comparatively few of the poems mature and increase in our understanding with age. Like the work of Butterfield or Ninian Comper, their bright apparatus feels fixed in the museum of the past.

LRB 25 April 1991 | PDF Download