The virtues of Robert Bernard Martin’s new life of Hopkins are such as to make it not only a good life of a great poet but the best we are likely to have until such time as the world becomes profoundly moved again by those religious controversies that so moved Hopkins.¹ Martin, as in his previous biographies (Kingsley, Tennyson, FitzGerald), does his homework, spade-work, and leg-work; every reader of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, even the best informed, will at least have to admit to having learned from it many a new substantial fact about Hopkins and his setting; and since there is no substitute for a biographer’s assiduous fair-minded clarity, this is a book to be thanked.

Hopkins’s life can have no surprises now, though it had plenty then. Gifted, craving, stubborn, idiosyncratic, and brave in the face of his parents’ dismayed resistance, he made his way to the Church of Rome and (a fortiori?) to the Society of Jesus. No less bravely, and with no grand preceder here who could be to him in poetry what the tranquilly obdurate Newman had been in religious conversion, Hopkins made his even lonelier way to the heights and depths of his own art. “Slaughter of the innocents”: with this laconic journal entry in 1868 he recorded the burning of his early poems, a sacrifice demanded of him (he exacerbatedly believed) by his religious vocation. But the tentative encouragement of his superior upon