SOURCE: "The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins," in The Hudson Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter, 1949, pp. 455-76.

Winters was an American poet and critic known for his negative opinion of Hopkins's work. In the following essay, he compares of Hopkins's sonnet "No Worst" to a poem by John Donne and Robert Bridges's "Low Barometer," concluding that Hopkins's poem suffers from its overemphasis of emotion and its failure to suggest a rational motivation for the feeling expressed in the piece. In the second part of the essay, he discusses the difficulties in determining the correct scansion of Hopkins's poetry in general.

It is my intention to begin by comparing three poems, a sonnet by John Donne, a short poem by Robert Bridges, and a sonnet by Gerard Hopkins, and to compare them with reference to a particular theory of poetry. The poems by Donne and Bridges conform to this theory...