Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'To R.B.' As Antidote to Writer's Block

Nick Ripatrazone unpacks the story behind Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem dedicated to Robert Bridges, "To R.B." at Literary Hub. "All writers are susceptible to writer’s block, but perhaps none more acutely than poets..." Ripatrazone writes. "I recommend poets and writers read a poem from 1889 for some unlikely inspiration." Picking up from there: 

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “To R.B.” on April 22, 1889. The Jesuit priest had completed a drawing that day of a local stream from “Lord Massey’s domain” in Dublin. It was the day after Easter Sunday, and he had been feeling sick. He held onto the poem for a week, and then mailed it to the R.B. invoked in the title: Robert Bridges, his longtime friend. They’d met in 1863 at Oxford, and began writing letters to each other in 1865. Despite a few pauses, their correspondence would continue for over 20 years. Bridges, who would become Britain’s poet laureate, later collected and published Hopkins’s poems in 1918. The two close friends disagreed often—about Catholicism and poetry—and despite Bridges’s tepid preface for Hopkins’s collected poems, he deserves credit for the publication of Hopkins’s innovative, essential work.

Hopkins is playful, pointed, and proud in his letters to Bridges. After Bridges offered some critical advice for his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins said that his “verse is less to be read than heard,” and advises Bridges to study his explanations of sprung rhythm. “I do not write for the public,” Hopkins told Bridges. “You are my public and I hope to convert you.” Convert, for Hopkins, held a multitude of meanings—but for Hopkins, all roads led to poetry.

Learn more at Literary Hub.