In a long essay apropos of Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, G. M. Young works himself around to modern versification and to G. M. Hopkins. What should have been a development, he says, has turned out to be a catastrophe. “It is common, too, I find to look on Hopkins as the chief legislator of the new mode. For Hopkins as a poet I have the greatest admiration, but his theories on metre seem to me to be as demonstrably wrong as those of any speculator who has ever led a multitude into the wilderness to perish. Unfortunately they have been used as a justification for the cacophonies which naturally result when the metrically deaf write verse, and the metrically deaf are a very large class.” Young is not sure of the right meaning of counterpoint, but “using it as Hopkins did,” he says: “You must counterpoint to avoid monotony, but you must not silence the pattern. You can only work within limits, and if you go beyond them the result is prose. It is no use saying like the Pharisees: ‘It is Corban, a sprung rhythm’: it will not be verse.” That Young uses Hopkins as a stick to beat the moderns is merely amusing; they had their own bit of chaos and needed a form in which to express it. But when he casts a doubt on Hopkins' theories on meter and forth-rightly accuses Hopkins of “an ignorance of his subject so profound that he was not aware there was anything to know”—that is, as he would say, certainly a bone for the dog. And when, on the other hand, Sir Herbert Read, lending his authority to the defense, says that “Hopkins shows that he understood the technique of English poetry as no poet since Dryden had understood it,” it is time to apply a few tests. A beginning was made ten years ago by Yvor Winters, rather more extreme than what follows here. But granted that both Young and Winters have a strong case, it still seems best to deal patiently with Hopkins, if only because he was an impetuous novice in prosody, too impatient to think his theories through before he began to explain them.