“like a great dragon,folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.”

As Paul Mariani points out in “Gerard Manley Hopkins,” his generous new biography, the “unpromising beginnings” of Hopkins’s prosodic revolution were in a Jesuit classroom in London, where as a teacher of rhetoric he tried to impart something of his enthusiasm for the later rhythms of Milton and the alliterative effects of the Anglo-Saxons. Then, in 1875, Hopkins was peculiarly moved by the sinking of the Deutschland — in particular by an article in The Times of London about five Franciscan nuns (fleeing the anti-Catholic laws of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf) who clung together in the storm while the tallest cried, over and over, “O Christ, come quickly!” With his rector’s blessing, Hopkins wrote a sprawling tour de force titled “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in which he first “realized on paper” the oratorical possibilities of so-called sprung rhythm. As Hopkins would tirelessly explain (in so many words) for the rest of his life, this involved “scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.”

Robert Bridges, the future poet laureate of England, informed his friend Hopkins that he’d managed to read all 280 lines of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” but would not be persuaded for any amount of money to read it again. And yet Bridges remained beguiled by the possibilities of sprung rhythm, attempting (with indifferent results, as Hopkins saw it) to use it in his own work. When at last he saw fit to introduce Hopkins’s singular poetry to the world, some 30 years after his friend’s death, Bridges opened the volume with “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.” Entrance would be gained, however, and toward the end of his biography Mariani gives us a nice glimpse of Bridges’ venerable dotage, when he was visited by Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley — not because those two modernists wished to see the laureate himself, but rather because they wished to see “the Hopkins manuscripts” in the laureate’s possession. “Even the self-contented Bridges must see a certain irony in all of this,” Mariani observes.

Mariani, who has written biographies of Hart Crane and Robert Lowell, sketches such scenes to good effect, and writes with a deep, sympathetic knowledge of Hopkins’s sometimes dauntingly esoteric religious and aesthetic concerns (insofar as the two can be properly separated).  ~From a review of Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Life, by Paul Mariani  [Review by Blake Bailey: A Modern Victorian/ NYT/  December 12, 2008]