The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of strict asceticism in its broadest definition--the refusal of physical pleasure or comfort in the interests of moral or spiritual gain. As a result, his commentators have felt obliged to take a stand approving or disapproving of this rigorous self-discipline: Many idealize his allegiance to the Society of Jesus as motivated by his determination to conquer his attraction to other men, and thus as the source of the spiritual strength from which his eucharistic and Christological verse derived. Others decry his monasticism as the...