News at Eleven: Robert Bridges, the future poet laureate of England,

informed his friend [Gerald Manley] Hopkins that he'd managed to read all 280 lines of "The Wreck of the Deutschland," but would not be persuaded for any amount of money to read it again. And yet Bridges remained beguiled by the possibilities of sprung rhythm, attempting (with indifferent results, as Hopkins saw it) to use it in his own work. When at last he saw fit to introduce Hopkins's singular poetry to the world, some 30 years after his friend's death, Bridges opened the volume with "The Wreck of the Deutschland," "like a great dragon," he wrote, "folded in the gate to forbid all entrance."

from The New York Times: A Modern Victorian

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