Congratulations to Constance Everett-Pite (Corpus Christi College) for winning the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize 2024, with their essay titled: ‘Green thoughts, Green Shades: remembering Homer with trees.’
The judges said: "This is a remarkably ambitious and accomplished essay. It offers an intricate set of thoughts on the ways poetry thinks about itself or thinks itself into being through a variety of ‘green’ images. Leaves, trees and water become the unifying motifs for a series of nuanced meditations on the poetry of Alice Oswald and Jorie Graham. Through attentive and interesting interpretation of Oswald’s lectures as professor of poetry (on water and earth in particular) the writer uncovers a story of Oswald’s attempt to bring alive in writing an oral ecopoetic tradition (derived from Homer). Green thoughts (modern and ecocritical) ‘sprout’ from green shades (the memory of Homeric past/antique poetry). Like a poem, water and plant transform, fall, and grows again. Oswald’s similes, the essay persuasively demonstrates, find creative contact with ancientness but cannot substitute for the ‘absence’ in green shade. Likewise, Jorie Graham’s similar project of ecological elegy (albeit not in conversation with a Homeric past) finds in trees the roots to articulate bereavement personal and environmental. We admired the writer’s astute attention to sound as well as sense, its interleaving of leaves and trees across generations, its philosophical rhyming of leaf and grief. The essayist’s attention to sound and sense and weighing of words can also be seen in the essay’s own good sentences, such as its closing one: “The creative green thoughts sit beside the ghostly green shades”—a neat trick that brings back Marvell, but where the shade of trees overlap with the shades of Homer, regeneration and loss side by side. The quality of scholarship and levels of attention on display here are first rate and there are some lovely discriminations (poeticisms that are ‘anthropomorphic but not assimilating’), as well as a deep receptivity to the affective range of green thoughts (greenness is not only a sign of life but is also ‘a kind of grief.’). We also appreciated that there were tangential shoots in the footnotes, the sense that the essay barely contained the fizzing thoughts stirred forth."
Constance commented: "I loved writing this essay and it's a great honour to receive the prize. My heartfelt thanks go to the panel of readers in the English Faculty."
Congratulations also to Millie Dean-Lewis (Wadham) who was awarded proxime/second place for her essay titled: ‘/vɛʁ/’
The judges said: "We really enjoyed this reflective piece of writing. It really is thinking about green, in a creative exploration of language’s capacity to make ‘colour’ (and specifically this colour spectrum) present. The essay is playful and delightfully inventive. And the play on different homophones of vert was brilliant. The open-ended directionality or multi-directionality of vers (as in towards) advertises well the style of the essay. It assumes the position of the third bird in the story about Zeuxis’ mimetic perfection in his art. Instead of attempting to peck the grapes in the painting the third bird contemplates it. The use of the fable as a basis for various flights of thought, is very nicely realised, veering from Joni Mitchell’s ‘Little Green’, to the gray-green deceit described by Besant and Leadbetter, to writing on green paper and green jealousy of other texts (Colin Clout fancifully imagined as jealous of the Faerie Queene), to the errancy of Mondegreen and Eve."
Millie commented: "Was of course very lovely to get to write about green so extensively! I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to do so."
