Passion and Playfulness in the Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

Friends since their undergraduate days at Oxford, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges exchanged letters for the next twenty-six years, until Hopkins’s death in 1889. Witty, whimsical and occasionally waspish; literary, theological and sometimes political; intimate, vulnerable and, once, mutually wounded: their correspondence offers unique access into their relationship, but also into their individual personal and poetic development. In particular, Hopkins’s letters to Bridges represent his most thorough-going attempts to explain his innovative metre, ‘sprung rhythm’, which explanation emerges with special clarity in part because of the extent to which Bridges is unwilling, or perhaps unable, to recognise those prosodical ‘licences’ that Hopkins called ‘laws’.