The Road to Parnassus

Abstract

By the time of his death in 1889, when Queen Victoria (who had come to the throne seven years before his birth in 1844) still had fifteen years to reign, less than a dozen poems by Hopkins had appeared in print. None of these would be considered important by later readers, nor did they appear in contexts likely to attract serious critical attention — comic verses in the Stonyhurst Magazine, a piece from pre-Oxford days printed in Once a Week, other poems in religious monthlies — these gave no indication of the riches which were in store for posterity.