He is likely to prove, for our time and the future, the only influential poet of the Victorian age, and he seems to me the greatest.” So F. R. Leavis concluded his groundbreaking chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). Leavis proved his claim that “Hopkins belongs with Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot and the later Yeats as opposed to Spenser, Milton and Tennyson.” The accidents of publication history favored this ranking. Hopkins (1844–1889) became known only with the appearance, in 1918, of a selection of his poems edited by Robert Bridges, his principal correspondent and by then Poet Laureate. Hopkins was thus an accidental “contemporary” of early Eliot (Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917) and Pound—indeed he might have appeared more modern than the Pound of that pre-Mauberley period. He came to notice in the wake of Grierson’s editions of Donne (1912) and just ahead of Yeats’s collection The Wild Swans at Coole(1919). Had the selection been published a year or two after his death, he would have appeared alongside Bridges himself, Browning, and Henley. Bridges rendered a real service to English poetry by putting Hopkins’s poems into circulation, but, as Leavis repeatedly complained, he also showed himself unable to understand them, taking their originality for incompetence and distorting them by unauthorized alterations. The best subsequent edition of the poems, by Norman H. Mackenzie (1990), is long out of print, as are the standard editions of Hopkins’s prose and correspondence.