I was lucky enough once to read an article about two remarkable books: The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile, published by Garland in New York. I admire and rejoice in the poetry of Hopkins. A few of his poems are of an astonishing, imperishable beauty; I not only never get tired of reading them but each time I read one of these poems it seems quite new, different and better, more fully charged with the inexplicable wonder of what genius can do with words. If you have not ever read Hopkins go immediately to the National Library and discover him. Even the ordinary letters he wrote are full of extraordinary glimpses of truth and beauty in life.
But it is not so much about the poetry that I want to write, it is about the scholarship that brought forth these wonderful books. Norman MacKenzie, the editor, devoted most of his adult life to indefatigable research into the Hopkins papers and the manuscript poems. He has produced what is
