(WP; Poetry Foundation biography). Hopkins is known as one of the most difficult English poets to read, and his poems bear out this reputation: they are always challenging in syntax, the vocabulary occasionally fazes even me, and some border on the incomprehensible (I had to read “Carrion Comfort” at least 3 times before I could honestly say I started to understand any of it, and I don’t get the meaning of much of it).

As important as his Catholicism was to him, the insertions of God into his poems often comes off as blunt, didactic, and unconvincing, especially compared to his ability to lyrically evoke nature, and I often felt that a poem would have been better off without it, quite aside from the apparently baleful effects of becoming a Jesuit on his life. (One author argues that Hopkins could not have been Hopkins without a devotion to God to drive his verse; but Nature has always served poets adequately in this regard…) His friend and editor, Robert Bridges, in the afterword quite accurately describes Hopkins’s faults: the grammar and syntax is unusually elliptical and out of order, exacerbated by the use of ambiguous words or simply obscure ones, often jammed together or rewritten to suit the rhythm (scrambling the sense even further), and the use of appallingly conventional rhymes. (One thinks of people who have mastered erudite vocabularies, but have not mastered when to use those words.) Hopkins, in other words, needed an editor. Bridges defends Hopkins as growing out of his excesses at his untimely death, and it is to be regretted that we’ll never know what poetry a mature Hopkins might have written; had he lived to a ripe old age, he might be as well remembered as Robert Frost is, instead of as an obscure and little-read experimentalist.

In descending order, I particularly liked:

“Spring and Fall”

This one, I feel, exemplifies Hopkins. The theme is classic, the integration of tragedy with nature is apt, and Hopkins’s complexities are reined in and instead of being nuisances, are beautiful - “Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie” is a striking line, and the final lines are fluent and perfect.
“Pied Beauty”
“Binsey Poplars”
“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”
‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.’

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

Overall, I felt Hopkins’s corpus exhibits more frustrated promise than reward.

I read the Project Gutenberg edition.