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In response to the first edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement observed in January 1919 that Hopkins had an affinity for linking words “merely because they are alike in sound. This, at its worst, produces the effect almost of idiocy, of speech without sense and prolonged merely by echoes. It seems to be a bad habit, like stuttering.” Yet, the essayist concludes, “[i]t is as if he heard everywhere a music too difficult, because too beautiful, for our ears and noted down what he could catch of it; authentic fragments that we trust even when they bewilder us.”1 This feeling of being bewildered by Hopkins’s sounds and simultaneously appreciating their authenticity remained a hallmark of readers’ responses. A respondent in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) echoed the TLS’s reaction to Hopkins’s poetry: “Has a decided fascination for me, but it is an irritating rather than a satisfactory fascination.... I find myself attending exclusively to the sound and general feel of the word-pattern regardless of the sense.”2 Sixty years on, critical works such as Eric Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989) were still deciding whether the relations between the “semantic processes” of Hopkins’s poems and their “sonic material” were “regrettable” or “inevitable.”3
In a November 1885 letter Hopkins wrote to his brother Everard, he expounds on the nature of his poetry, especially sound. “Poetry was originally meant for either singing or reciting, a record was kept of it; the record could be, was, read, and that in time by one reader, alone, to himself, with the eyes only,” he posits. “Sound-effects were intended . . . but they bear the marks of having been meant for the . . . merely mental performance of the closet, the study, and so on.” Then he declares, “This is not the true nature of poetry, the darling child of speech, of lips and spoken utterance: it must be spoken; till it is spoken it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself. Sprung rhythm gives back to poetry its true soul and self.” The problem for poetry, in Hopkins’s view, is that the sonic beauties and stirring acoustic effects...