Congratulations to Julian Kekulé (Magdalen College), who has been awarded this year’s Chancellor's English Essay Prize for his essay 'That Fluttering Stranger'. The essay subject for 2025-26 was: ‘Second Sense’.
The judges commented: "That Fluttering Stranger’ was an excellent essay that captiously illustrated how metre might operate as a second sense. Well-grounded in aspects of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and Schiller’s development of Kantian ideas, the essay gave a fine account of metre’s Geist-like qualities and brought this framework to bear — in judicious ways — on Coleridge’s theorising and Wordsworth’s poetic practice. The essay was written with confidence and gusto but also had the necessary precision when describing poetics in action. The pace of the piece (its agile transitions and shifts in momentum); its organisation (nicely divided into three main strands of argument); and its lovely mix of the panoramic and the closely observed made this a very compelling read and a worthy winner."
Julian commented: "I feel delighted to have been awarded this prize in recognition of an essay that it was a joy to research and write. Apart from the ladies and gentlemen on the judging panel, I would like to extend my gratitude to Professor Tregear of Merton who first led my inquiry into the direction of Kant, as well as Professor Douglas-Fairhurst of Magdalen without whose invaluable teaching on Wordsworth and Coleridge this piece would have been inconceivable."
Congratulations also to Esme Gutch (Hertford College), who was selected runner-up for their essay 'Borrowed Light: second sense and sensing second with Dorothy Richardson'.
The judges commented: "The essay ‘Borrowed Light’ was a very close runner-up. It provided a detailed and subtle discussion of the different senses of a second sense in Dorothy Richardson — one that paid rewarding attention to her overlooked verse. Often emphasising the temporal dimensions, belatedness or secondness of a second sense, the essay offered astute reflections on repetition and memory. It also said precise things about inchoate ways of knowing, our plural yet incomplete ways of sensing things. The essay ably revealed how Richardson both describes and conditions a kind of ‘twilight’ knowledge, alongside a more liminal set of experiences and mixed feelings. The prose throughout retained a deep intimacy with its subject and had a meditative, in-dwelling quality — making criticism itself feel a little like a second sense."
