SOURCE: "Instress of Inscape," in Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966, pp. 168-77.

Warren was an American educator and literary critic with a special interest in theology and church history. In the following essay which was originally published in 1948, he explores the defining characteristics of Hopkins's middle poems, emphasizing his penchant for "the sensuous, the concrete, and the particular."

The early Hopkins follows Keats and the "medieval school" (as he called the Pre-Raphaelites). The latest Hopkins, who wrote the sonnets of desolation, was a poet of tense, economic austerity. Their nearest parallel I can summon would be Donne's "holy sonnets": "Batter my heart" and "If poisonous minerals." For the mode of "Andromeda" and the later sonnets (1885-89), Hopkins himself projected "a more Miltonic plainness and severity": He was thinking of Milton's sonnets and the choruses of Samson. In 1887 he invoked another...