This paper discusses how much of the imagery in Gerald Manley Hopkins'
poetry is written in bad-
taste and how much of this
bad-taste involves the sexual urge in some way. Through an analysis of some of his poems, it looks at how Hopkins was phonocentric
poet and how it is possible to trace moments of bad-taste in specific, recurrent sound-patterns. It examines the bad-taste in Hopkins' consistent allusion to the pleasurable act in terms of his idiolect, his poetics and the running tropes that facilitate bad-taste in his
poetry. It concludes with the idea that Hopkins was, indeed, a poet of Baroque bad taste.