Poems
Hopkins invented "sprung rhythm" and a technique of compressed consonantal music ("the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!") that had no precedent in English. His packed, hyphenated, internally rhyming lines sound unlike anything written before or since. He published almost nothing in his lifetime; Robert Bridges released his poems 29 years after his death, and they detonated. Every 20th-century poet from Auden to Heaney felt their impact.
Sprung rhythm asks you to scan every line twice, and the compound coinages ('dapple-dawn-drawn') sit one notch from self-parody, a notch Hopkins does not always hold. The ecstatic nature sonnets all resolve to the same theological chord: praise Him. Outside the terrible sonnets, the doubt that would complicate the rapture rarely gets a vote. Gorgeous, mannered, narrow.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
