SOURCE: "A New Style," in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twayne, 1982, pp. 64-92.

Bump is an American critic with a special interest in Hopkins's work. In the following excerpt, he offers a stylistic analysis of his poetry, focusing on the recurrence or "parallelism" of certain sounds in Hopkins's work.

Hopkins's new style was developed in response to his question, "If the best prose and the best poetry use the same language… why not use unfettered prose?" [Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins]. He answered, "It is plain that metre, rhythm, rhyme, and all the structure which is called verse both necessitate and engender a difference in diction and in thought." The first difference is "concentration and all which is implied by this. This does not mean terseness nor rejection of what is collateral nor emphasis nor even definiteness." Indeed, though Hopkins achieved a conciseness and concentration unusual among Victorian poets, he...