It is kind of understandable why they thought these poems "unpublishable" in the Victorian era. Formally they most definitely feel "modern" even looking at them today but unfortunately thematically and in their language they are still badly dated Victorian. ( )

Not my thing at all, even though it may surely have blown Victorian-pious Christian minds in the early 20th century, when it was first posthumously released. ( )

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The second of Penguin's Little Black Classics shows a collection of poems of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Unfortunately, they were not my taste and failed for the most part to hold my attention.

One nice little detail I wanted to point out though. I'm sure it has happened to a lot of us for whom English is not the mother tongue. Sometimes when a word also exist in your own language (but with a different meaning) you'll be unable to see it properly in English. One of Hopkins' poems provided one of these cases. It is in fact 'no worst, there is none'. Which at first seems a normal sentence, but I believe I also pointed it out in a review of a book with the same name, 'worst' is the Dutch word for sausage, which led to some confusion on my side. The author, however, is not the least to be blamed for this in any case, but still I don't think I will purchase a larger collection of his poems. ( )

I wanted to like this but I found the poems a little boring and the diary entries did not hold my attention. ( )

This one had a few things against it for me;
1) experimental form poetry
2) frequent religious references
3) experimental form poetry
His journal entries at the end were beautifully written but the poetry was awkward (to my mind - maybe it is because I don't have an English accent - Australian twang doesn't make for rhyme)
Glad I tried it but would not go back for more
( )