In an 1881 letter to a friend and poetic mentor, Gerard Manley Hopkins articulates a theory of literary relations that accounts for direct influence as well as indirect likenesses of temperament among poets:

I must hold that you and Morris belong to one school, and though you should neither of you have read a line of the other's. I suppose the same models, the same masters, the same tastes, the same keepings, above all, make the same school. It will always be possible to find differences, marked differences, between original minds; it will necessarily be so. So the species in nature are essentially distinct. Nevertheless, they are grouped into genera: they have one form in common, mounted on that they have a form that differences them. I used to call it the school of [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti; it is in literature the school of the Pre-Raphaelites. (Works, 252)

This abiding interest in the development of literary schools, and particularly in establishing the "common form" on which the "form that differences" individual poets may be laid, begs a question Jerome Bump articulates simply: "To what group did Hopkins himself belong?" Bump's assessment of the poet-priest as a silent member of the D. G. Rossettian movement rings true, and his suggestion that the Pre-Raphaelite dream-vision serves as a common form for works as diverse as DGR's "The Blessed Damozel," Christina Rossetti's "The Convent Threshold," and Hopkins"'Lines for a Picture of St. Dorothea," provides a fruitful starting-point for an examination of the entire school (Bump 1982, 45ff).