SOURCE: "Gerard Hopkins," in The Dial, Vol. LXXXI, No. 81, September, 1986, pp. 195-203.

Richards was an English poet and critic who has been called the founder of modern literary criticism. Primarily a theorist, he encouraged growth of textual analysis and during the 1920s formulated many of the principles that would later become the basis of New Criticism, one of the most important schools of modern critical thought. In the following essay first published in 1926, he analyzes the obscure and innovative nature of Hopkins's verse, maintaining that "it is an important fact that he is so often most himself when he is most experimental."

Modern verse is perhaps more often too lucid than too obscure. It passes through the mind (or the mind passes over it) with too little friction and too swiftly for the development of the response. Poets who can compel slow reading have thus an initial advantage...