Admire and Do Otherwise: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ivor Gurney

In 1985, Michael D. Moore wrote a fascinating and useful article looking at Ivor Gurney as “[a]part from Robert Bridges, the first poet of any significance to exhibit the apparent influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins.”¹ He came to the conclusion that “Gurney’s importance in the larger history of poetry will always be relatively slight,”² but I would like to discuss Gurney’s debt to Hopkins and suggest that Gurney’s importance “in the larger history of poetry” is that he epitomizes the dramatic change from nineteenth-century poetry and its offshoot Georgianism to Modernism, and it would appear that this change was fundamentally