Poems
Hopkins invented "sprung rhythm" and a technique of compressed consonantal music ("the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!") that had no precedent in English. His packed, hyphenated, internally rhyming lines sound unlike anything written before or since. He published almost nothing in his lifetime; Robert Bridges released his poems 29 years after his death, and they detonated. Every 20th-century poet from Auden to Heaney felt their impact.
The religious content is the sticking point two-star reviewers name directly: heavy Catholic and Jesuit theology a secular reader has to push through poem after poem. The nature poems compound the problem, blurring together into what one reader calls “an exhausting glut of poems on the natural world,” the same worshipful move made again and again. The invented, archaic diction needs a glossary of its own, and sprung rhythm read cold produces stumbling rather than the intended music for readers who find the whole approach “obscure and overly complex, even for straightforward descriptions.” One review sums up the barrier simply: “his work is just a bit too impenetrable for my taste.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
