Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Famous poets W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot both complained that Hopkins's language and rhythms were too strange and inaccessible. An odd complaint, perhaps, given that Yeats's poetry is famous for being heavily symbolic and cryptic, and Eliot's most famous poem (The Waste Land) is renowned for its disjunctive language and vast number of allusions (which no average reader could be expected to pick up on or understand without a whole bunch of help). (Source: Ramazani, Ellmann, O'Clair; The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 1 Modern Poetry)
Hopkins's poems were never published during his lifetime. His friend, poet Robert Bridges, waited until almost twenty years after Hopkins's death to publish his collected poems in 1918. (Source)