Books: Poet's Poet

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS — Eleanor Ruggles—Norton ($3.50).

In the winter of 1875 the sailing ship Deutschland foundered in a storm in the Thames estuary. All her crew and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany, went down with her. Far away in the Welsh mountains, 31-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit novice, was shocked by the catastrophe into writing his first poem in seven years. He sent The Wreck of the Deutschland to his young friend, Poet Robert Bridges, who carefully pasted the epic into an album. There it remained for 40 years, until...