This chapter shows how Hopkins’s letters to his family members, fellow poets, and friends allow readers access to two crucial aspects of the poet’s unusual career. In the first place, we witness the development of those personal relationships that gave him scope for practising and performing his craft; relationships which were both crucial and conflicted for a writer who firmly held religious life to be paramount. In the second instance, these letters feature Hopkins’s clearest explanations of his aesthetic principles, as well as their correlation with his spiritual beliefs.