Patmore's Theory and Hopkins' Practice
Margaret Stobie · University of Toronto Quarterly · 1950
It is remarkable that often the near past is the most obscure period of history. This hooded quality of the proximate is exemplified in the fate of the prosody of Hopkins. Bridges, publishing Hopkins’ poems thirty years after his death, comments: “it was an idiosyncrasy of this student’s mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty.” Taken up with later theories which were engaging the interests of pets in 1918, Bridges did not bother to mention what the “simple theory” was, although by his tone he must have been familiar with it. It was left for Mr. Harold Whitehall, in 1944, discover that this theory was the so-called dipodic theory which had first been announced by Patmore.