I think it’s a fair bet that if you asked most people on this side of the Atlantic who claim to enjoy reading poetry who their favorite pre-twentieth-century English language poets are, they’d say “Donne and Emily Dickinson”: on the other side of the Atlantic the odds are they’d say “Donne and Hopkins.” Much as I like a lot of the verse of Donne, and a fair amount of Dickinson, and even a bit (a very little bit) of Hopkins, I think this indicates where the trouble with modern poetry lies. All three are eccentrics: their poems are hard to comprehend and seem to stand in need of explication, though their habitually excited tone makes even the uninitiated feel that some kind of genuine feeling must be there, even if we can’t quite paraphrase it; and their technique is to some extent both experimental and sui generis. They’re odd-balls, whose verses can be both hard to paraphrase and, in the cases ...

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