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 "Hopkins’s famous letter to Robert Bridges of October 18 1882, which includes the arresting statement, ‘But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living,’ is the bedrock upon which all that has been written about the two poets stands. Although Hopkins vigorously discounted any similarity in their respective rhythmic properties, his admission in the same letter that their ‘extremes meet’ compels further investigation. What Hopkins was drawn to was Whitman’s subject matter, not the manner of his poetic expression. Moreover, Hopkins’s remarks about Whitman are of an intensity that is found nowhere else except in what he has to say about Duns Scotus, the mediaeval theologian and philosopher, and the seventeenth century composer, Henry Purcell. In these men, what Hopkins values is their rare distinctiveness, a quality he also saw in Whitman." |
