With a few exceptions of uncharacteristic poems appearing in minor periodicals, Hopkins’s poems were not published during his lifetime and were read only by friends and fellow poets. Hopkins resisted the entreaties of his friends to publish. His reluctance was probably due to his anticipation of responses such as that of the poet and critic Coventry Patmore after wrestling with a number of Hopkins’s poems. Patmore, cited in Paul L. Mariani’s A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, complained that the poems required “the whole attention to apprehend and digest them.” He added that Hopkins’s poetry was “arduous” enough without the added difficulty of “several entirely novel and simultaneous experiments in versification and construction,” together with an “altogether unprecedented system of alliteration and compound words.”

Patmore was...