Bob, good to hear from you--and to share thoughts with you and others about Hopkins.
And, Caleb, yes, "sprung rhythm" has made it into dictionaries, though even there, the association is with Hopkins. For instance, the current unabridged Random House Dictionary says of the term: "a poetic rhythm characterized by the use of strongly accented syllables, often in juxtaposition, accompanied by an indefinite number of unaccented syllables in each foot, of which the accented syllable is the essential component [term introduced by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)]."
Hopkins himself, it bears repeating, wanted to make his metrical intentions as clear as he could, and employed accent marks, even in his more conventional poems, to insure that readers would not be confused as to the number of beats per line. For instance, in the (by his standards) relatively conventional sonnet, "As kingfishers catch fire," he places an accent over "I" in line 9 and "grace" and "grace" and "that" in line ten to make absolutely clear that line 9 is a headless pentameter and line 10 a brokenbacked one (i.e., a metrically unaccented syllable is dropped after a grammatical pause within the line). I can't both capitalize the "I" and give the accent, so pardon the lower case cummingesque first-person pronoun.
í say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
One thing we forget (or I sometimes do) is that Hopkins himself put many more diacritical marks in his mss. than are in the published texts. Editors from Bridges forward have (rightly, I think) believed that reproducing all his marks would make his texts unreadable. The downside of this, however, has been that we don't always remember how very exacting--for better or for worse, ingeniously or fanatically--Hopkins was.
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