Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Now First Published

Hopkins' poetry was so far ahead of its time that it wasn't published until after his death. What the world discovered in 1918 was a Victorian poet who had cracked English verse open and rebuilt it from the inside out. His "sprung rhythm" abandoned the sing-song of traditional meter for something rawer, more organic, more like actual human speech and feeling. This collection gathers his finished works and fragments, poems that see the divine burning through every blade of grass, every storm-bent oak, every wintry singleton. His religious vision is not pious buttonholing but ecstasy - physical, almost unbearable, as if the world were too much with God. For readers who think they know Victorian poetry, Hopkins is the shock that remakes the category.