89“Presumptious Jugglery”: Hopkins’s and Bridges’s Critical Views on Each Other’s Works

Abstract

As so often with Robert Bridges and Gerard Hopkins, we have again to turn to the letters to establish the context and quality of their relationship. This is no truer than when we look at the critical judgements each passed on the other’s poetry. Both men sent each other verses for comment and criticism throughout their lives; Bridges’s direct observations on the poetry of his friend are not available and only come to us obliquely through Hopkins’s epistolary responses, and the only primary critical remarks that we have are in his “Preface to Notes”, which, as we have seen, are undeniably negative overall. Consequently, much of the following discussion will lie on Hopkins’s abundant criticism of Bridges’s poetry.