My scholarship takes its cue from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s insight that poetry has ‘a logic of its own’ that throws it into competition with philosophy as a means of coming to know the world. I am particularly interested in the claim, made by poets from antiquity to the present day, that poetry might enable us to apprehend those things that lie beyond the usual sphere of knowledge and experience. As T. S. Eliot memorably put it, ‘in poetry you can, now and then, penetrate into another country, so to speak, before your passport has been issued or your ticket taken’. With such high stakes, my work necessarily has a theological as well as a philosophical edge. Perhaps my writing in this area might be best described as an effort to articulate the unique contribution that poetry makes to the intellectual life of both the individual and the wider culture.

I am currently completing a book about the English poet and philosopher, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. (1844-1889) – Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Intellectual Life (Bloomsbury). Hopkins is one of the finest and most original of the English poets, and was one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation, if also one of the most eccentric. The book is a study of how Hopkins thought ‘thinking’ happened and why it seemed to happen best when his attention was divided. It begins with his early haphazard patterns of attention and tells the story of how he developed this instinctive feeling for what he called the ‘manifoldness of knowledge’ into a stunning – and stunningly complex – theory of what it is to know, and to know well. The book explores how Hopkins tackled this central problem of epistemological complexity from a variety of disciplinary angles – philosophical, theological, aesthetic, and linguistic – before transforming it into the basis of his highly idiosyncratic poetics. Poetry, for Hopkins, was a means of wrangling with the complexity of mind and world – of making sense of that which seems beyond us.

My next project – Hopkins Among the Modernists – argues that the posthumous publication of Hopkins’ Poems in 1918 and 1930 transformed the practice and ambitions of modern verse-writing, re-legitimising poetry as a serious philosophical undertaking through which we might find the best answers to the hardest questions.

Anna Nickerson, Associate Professor in English; Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry, Christ Church.