problem of is crucial for the understanding and interpretation of most religious poets. Certainly is not to say that every religious poet is a mystic but rather that a relation to as a problem inevitably structures religious poetry and plays an important role in the creation of poetic identity. (1) This relation can vary from an enthusiastic acceptance of as internal revelation, which renders unnecessary both the scriptural and sacred traditions, to its total rejection as self-deception or a purely psychiatric phenomenon. In most cases, however, problem as such cannot be avoided. Indeed, a possibility of the direct contemplation of God or His perceptible (not strictly transcendent or intelligible) manifestations is hardly compatible with indifference the part of those poets who believe that articulation of the relationship between God and humanity must be a preeminent poetic goal. To put it another way, the centrality of as a possibility and a problem depends the relative significance of religious questions in general. And, correspondingly, radical faith makes the problem of inescapable. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet of radical and self-conscious faith. Most Hopkins critics today tend to assume that his poetry is completely bereft of mysticism, but was not always the case. It is precisely the mystical component of Hopkins' writings that attracted the attention of his first readers. Shortly after the first publication of his poems in 1918, for example, a reviewer wrote in Westminster Gazette that meant for him an intensification, not a denial, of life (qtd. in Gardner 1:222). A year later, in Essentials of and Other Essays, Evelyn Underhill mentioned Hopkins in a chapter titled The Mystic as Creative Artist. She stressed that in unlike most mystics, the impersonal mystical aspect is interwoven with personal elements; as a result, we come nearest to an understanding of the full experience he is trying to express (71). According to her, Hopkins is the greatest mystical poet of the Victorian era, in support of which claim she quoted two stanzas from Wreck of the Deutschland (72). A year after Underhill, in 1921, Edward Sapir also underscored Hopkins' consuming mysticism (68). In 1930, in the first book devoted to Gerald F. Lahey suggested that Hopkins' sonnets of 1885-86 (the so-called Terrible Sonnets) describe and epitomize the darkest, and perhaps the most sublime, part of the mystical ascent, which is conventionally referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul and Senses of Juan de la Cruz. Lahey wrote that Hopkins, smiling and joyful with his friends, was at the same time the bleak heights of spiritual night with his God. After enumerating several writers mysticism (St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, Poulain, Maumigny, etc), he concluded: The celebrated 'terrible' sonnets are only terrible in the same way that the beauty of Jesus Christ is terrible. Only the strong pinions of an eagle can realize the cherished happiness of such suffering. It is a place where Golgotha and Thabor met (104). This passage has been often quoted by Hopkins critics. In 1933, for example, Herbert Read cited Lahey's description of the Terrible Sonnets with approval and concluded that this absence of spiritual complacency is of the very essence of Christian Mysticism (105). Similarly, fifteen years later, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar quoted the same passage as Read did and then described Hopkins' last years as God's special favour, mystical ordeal, and divine blessing (145-46). Already in the 1930s, however, the attitude of critics toward Hopkins' supposed had undergone a significant change. Simultaneously with the publication of Lahey's book, Charles Williams was ready to admit only that Hopkins was on the verge of mystical vision (xii), thus seriously minimizing the claims of his predecessors. …