Winters was an American poet and critic known for his negative opinion of Hopkins's work. In the following essay, he compares of Hopkins's sonnet "No Worst" to a poem by John Donne and Robert Bridges's "Low Barometer," concluding that Hopkins's poem suffers from its overemphasis of emotion and its failure to suggest a rational motivation for the feeling expressed in the piece. In the second part of the essay, he discusses the difficulties in determini...

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.

In the following essay, Boyle examines the major themes of The Wreck of the Deutschland, asserting that it is not a poem about the problem of suffering but a poem about the answer to the problem of suffering.

In the following essay, Sonstroem draws an analogy between Hopkins and the nonsense poets of the late nineteenth-century.

Egan is an Irish poet, critic, and the founder of the Hopkins Society in Ireland. In the following essay, he summarizes Hopkins's influence on several major poets.

Warren was an American educator and literary critic with a special interest in theology and church history. In the following essay which was originally published in 1948, he explores the defining characteristics of Hopkins's middle poems, emphasizing his penchant for "the sensuous, the concrete, and the particular."

Leavis is an influential contemporary critic. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1932, he claims that Hopkins' strength lies in his attempt to bring poetry closer to living speech.

In the following essay, Anderson points out that little attention has been paid to the numerical inscapes in Hopkin's poetry, and argues that the Virgin Mary poems demonstrate the development and complexity of the dialectic between verbal and numerical structures in his work.

In the following essay, Holloway discusses Gerard Manley Hopkins's shipwreck ode "The Wreck of the Deutschland" as a poem concerned with life and resurrection.

In the following essay, Motto describes how aphorism functions in Hopkins's poetry.

Richards was an English poet and critic who has been called the founder of modern literary criticism. Primarily a theorist, he encouraged growth of textual analysis and during the 1920s formulated many of the principles that would later become the basis of New Criticism, one of the most important schools of modern critical thought. In the following essay first published in 1926, he analyzes the obscure and innovative nature of Hopkins's verse, maintaining that "it is an important fact that he...

Murry is recognized as one of the most significant English critics of the twentieth century, noted for his studies of major authors and for his contributions to modern critical theory. Perceiving an integral relationship between literature and religion, Murry believed that the literary critic must be concerned with the moral as well as the aesthetic dimensions of a given work. In the following review of the first edition of Hopkin 's poems, he suggests that the most distinguishing feature of Hopkins...

In the following essay, Lowenstein asserts that the features that give "Pied Beauty" its distinctive quality are characteristic of Impressionist art.