Call for Papers: "Hopkins as Classicist"
A Special Issue of The Hopkins Quarterly
Proposal Deadline: February 14, 2025
Essay Deadline: December 31, 2025

The ‘difficulties’ of the old Greek philosophers, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘cannot be poohpoohed: some perhaps are really resolved, but generally they exist still’ (D.XII.1 [Great feature of the old Gk. philosophy]. CW, IV, 305.) This special issue of the Hopkins Quarterly seeks to understand the invigorating influence of classical thought on Hopkins’ intellectual life.
This effort to understand Hopkins as a classical thinker is not a conservative or scholastic exercise in the narrow sense. Hopkins – like many of his contemporaries – found in these ancient and perplexing texts a provocation towards some of his most original, radical, and self-consciously modern experiments in poetry and poetics. As such, we are particularly interested in understanding how Hopkins’ encounters with ancient texts – within the context of the liberal scholarship of mid-century Oxford – informed not only his philosophy but also the character of his intellectual practice.
There is, we suspect, much more to be learnt at a textual level about Hopkins’ use of classical sources, especially in relation to his habits of quotation, translation, and (often unadvertised) appropriation, and particularly (but not exclusively) in his Oxford Essays and Notes and Lectures on Poetry. But we are also conscious that Hopkins’ lifelong engagement with classical literatures and languages shaped his thought in ways that do not leave such obvious textual traces. For instance, his facility with Greek and Latin – and, perhaps, his daily discipline of an hour’s Latin conversation with his Jesuit confreres – seems to have trained him to think across (or between) languages, grammars, and prosodies. This, combined with his private study of classical verse form, seems to be a vital context for understanding many of the oddities and innovations of his writing.
Essayists might find it productive to think about Hopkins’ classicism in relation to his activities as:
- translator
- lecturer
- prosodist
- grammarian
- literary critic
- philosopher
- historiographer
We also welcome proposals discussing Hopkins’ debt to particular classical and neo-classical thinkers (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine) or in relation to the scholarship of the nineteenth-century Platonic revival (Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green, Walter Pater, James Riddell, Edwin Palmer, William Lambert Newman, Robert Scott, George Grote). We encourage proposals from classicists, philosophers, theologians, and historians as well as literary critics. We are particularly interested in proposals from those with expertise in classical prosody or with a strong background in Greek and/or Latin.
Essays should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, although we will also consider shorter notes on textual matters.
Please send proposals, with an indication of anticipated word count, to anna.nickerson@chch.ox.ac.uk by 14th February 2025.
Essays will be due by 31st December 2025.