John Bayley · Pork Chops

On a walking tour in 1866, just before his conversion, Hopkins visited Tintern Abbey, and paid it the highest compliment he could think of by saying it reminded him of the architecture of Butterfield, designer of Keble College. When we say X has no sense of humour it means he has one different from our own, but Hopkins’s idea of fun is very Victorian, very religious, very remote indeed. It certainly did not include Butterfield, or belief. But when rediscovered in the 1920s and 30s, he seemed so amazingly of our time, and his poetry almost a necessary part of Modernism, that its obvious roots in Victorian Gothic looked hardly relevant. Since…