LUCKY PUBLICATION–HOPKINS.

LUCKY PUBLICATION–HOPKINS. Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the greatest English poets. Adam Kirsch has a good article in the New Yorker about Hopkins in which Kirsch says that “Bridges… pronounced Hopkins’s life a total failure.” Bridges was a friend of Hopkins and a future poet laureate. Certainly what Kirsch quotes from Bridges is one of the harshest judgments imaginable; “That dear Gerard was overworked, unhappy and would never have done anything great seems to give no solace. But how much worse it would have been had his promise or performance been mores splendid.” The reference to lucky publication in the caption of this post is because Bridges was responsible for the publication of Hopkins’s poetry—thirty years after Hopkins died.