78 chapter 2
Hopkins’s metrical experiments were not ahead of his time; on the con-
trary, they place him firmly amid the Victorian concerns about the standards
and character of the English language, issues that demarcated a kind of bound-
ary against threats from without and disagreements within the ground of En-
glish letters. This metrical imaginary was shifting along with the idea of a Brit-
ish Empire, and Hopkins, who was writing concurrently with that linguistic
imperialist project, the New English Dictionary, was invested in the way that
poetry served the nation’s greatness. In 1886, Hopkins writes that “to be active
in writing poetry” is “even a patriotic duty.”^86 Imagined by modernist readers
as an isolated maverick and absorbed into literary history as a poet of indi-
vidual and misunderstood genius, Hopkins’s legacy deserves to be understood
through the public and private cultures of English meter that his writing nego-
tiated. Rather than the frustrated and secluded priest struggling privately with
his own faith, his fraught attraction to and repulsion from visual temptation,
perhaps we can read Hopkins’s considerations about the visual field—in his
development of inscape, in his wavering about the metrical mark, in his under-
standing of accent, and in his indication of phonemic depth—as a way to en-
rich our own understanding of his evolution as a poet deeply connected to the
spiritual health of the nation. By seeing Hopkins as a product of and respon-
dent to Victorian insecurities about its empire of letters, we might not become
an ideal imagined reader, converted by his verses, the stigma transferred to us,
but if we read his marks carefully and recognize the struggles that those marks
indicate, we take a step toward seeing the larger, national landscape against
which those struggles occurred.