the stigma of meter 49
1886: “A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England.”^3
After Hopkins’s death three years later, Bridges was reluctant to publish Hop-
kins’s poems despite the fact that he had a fair copy of a manuscript. Hopkins’s
experiments in “sprung rhythm,” a new meter for English and England, neces-
sitated marks for meter or, as Bridges explained in his introduction to Hop-
kins’s poems in Alfred A. Miles’s Poets and Poetry of the Century (1893): “Some
syllables have been accented in the text, as a guide to the reader, where it
seemed that the boldness of the rhythm might otherwise cause him to doubt
the intended stress.”^4 Bridges facilitated the publication of at least nineteen of
Hopkins’s poems between 1893 and 1902 before including six extracts and
poems in his self-edited and immensely popular wartime antholog y, The Spirit
of Man, in 1916; here, he reproduced some but not all of the metrical mark-
ings for which Hopkins is now well known.^5 But what did these marks mean?
Did Hopkins always intend to guide an imaginary, idealized performer toward
one kind of reading, or did his metrical marks and their material manifesta-
tion on the page indicate the possibility of different readings, or the struggle to
read accurately at all? Hopkins’s struggles with his meters reflect and intersect
with struggles about his role as a poet, investigations into philolog y, interest in
the visual world, and his hope that reading could lead to salvation. Reading
Hopkins’s meter as a crucial part of his conception of the visual world and
therefore of his theolog y, we can understand more fully his desperate, hope-
less, and frustrated desire to transmit this particular visual and spiritual theol-
og y to his few readers and, ideally, to the rest of England. The developments of
linguistic science and Hopkins’s position both as a Jesuit priest and as a stu-
dent and teacher of the classics position him uniquely to mediate between the
Anglo-Saxon and the classical and the public and private worlds of Victorian
poetry and prosody.
Writers and critics associated with the modernist avant-garde have relied
on the “great divide” narrative so much that any seemingly anachronistic ex-
periments of the nineteenth century are reinterpreted as anticipating the ex-
periments of the twentieth century. When Hopkins’s Poems were published
in 1918, critics like I. A. Richards heralded him as a “proto-modernist” rather
than a Victorian poet whose concept of “standard” prosody and syntax may
have been wildly different from what the modernists would have us believe.
Hopkins’s poems seem “modern,” that is, because of a misreading or igno-
rance of the proliferation of metrical experiments in the nineteenth century.
Bridges, who was Hopkins’s close friend, interlocutor, and his editor pub-
lished Hopkins’s poems in book form in 1918.^6 At that time, Bridges had the
prestige of the poet laureateship, and the poems fit perfectly into the context
of “difficult” modernist works emerging in the postwar moment—poems
that reconsidered form in all its guises. Construed by critics as “always ob-
scure”^7 and “music too difficult,”^8 the first edition of Hopkins’s poems baffled
more readers than it converted. In September 1926, Richards published an