Response to Failure provides a significant contribution to the existing body of literary scholarship on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, and Dylan Thomas. The author explores the texture of autobiographical experiences of failure that inform the poems and the poets’ responses within the intellectual, cultural, religious, and political climates of their times. Unique comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches, have been employed, including reader-response interpretation of the poems, as well as gender- and culture-centered theories of literary criticism and culture studies.