SOURCE: “Sacremental Symbolism in Hopkins and Eliot,” in Renascence, Vol. XX, No. 2, Winter, 1968, pp. 104-11.

In the following excerpt, Milward compares and contrasts Hopkins and Eliot, concluding that both are representatives of Catholic Christianity though their poetic sensibilities are completely different.

The question of the contribution of Christianity to modern English Literature is an exceedingly complex and difficult one to answer. The simplest and perhaps most satisfactory way of dealing with it is to show how the Christian faith unites the work of two poets who seem to have little in common beyond their faith and their influence on the present generation. I refer to Hopkins and Eliot, the Roman Catholic priest and the Anglo-Catholic layman. Considering that both may be regarded as representatives of Catholic Christianity, and that they are contemporaries, if not in life, at least in literary influence (the first two editions of Hopkins' Poems...