Introduction: “Rash-Fresh, Re-Winded, New-Skeinèd Score”: The Enduring Newness of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Few epithets are as old as being “new.” In Walter Benjamin’s words, “There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern’ in the sense of eccentric …. The ‘modern,’ however, is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope.”¹ In poetry, as in other arts, modernity is mainly perception. It is the shifting of a lens, leading us to experience the world as unfamiliar. William Logan describes this as an emotional response: “Poetry overthrows its predecessors by some new intensity of feeling cast in the vivid language of