Such a Mix of Beauty and Horror: Two Modes of Modernist Response to Hopkins

Have you read the poems of a man, who is dead, called Gerard Hopkins? I liked them better than any poetry for ever so long[.]” So Virginia Woolf inquired, in July 1919, of her friend and former Greek tutor Janet Case.² Six months later, Woolf loaned Case her copy of Hopkins’s Poems, with the caution, “Some are very lovely and quite plain; others such a mix of beauty and horror that it takes hours to sort them—for instance the long one on the wreck” (L3: 415).³ What lessons about writing could the novelist possibly have learned from this “difficult”