Hopkins's poetry, most of it published posthumously, is remarkable for the lively inventiveness of its language. Hopkins made use of ancient poetic devices (from, for example, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry). He employed common words in uncommon ways and coined new words as they suited his purposes. He used dialect, musical devices, elaborate alliteration, and convoluted word order. These techniques resulted in a powerful poetry like no one else's. Of his own work, Hopkins wrote to his friend, the poet Robert Bridges, No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness....[I]t is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped. His singularity also extended to rhythm: Hopkins was interested in developing his own peculiar rhythmic patterns, which he said was the native and natural rhythm of speech and termed sprung rhythm--a rhythm that was freed from the constricting techniques of standard poetic rhythms, achieving instead a looser, more musical effect that was ahead of its time in the Victorian era, looking forward to more modern 20th-century verse like that of W. H. Auden, who was strongly influenced by Hopkins. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.