Ancient Greek philosophy

As an undergraduate studying Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1860s, Hopkins found himself at the centre of the Victorian Platonic revival. This essay charts the contours of classical scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century and the outsize role played by Hopkins’s tutor Benjamin Jowett in promoting Presocratic and Platonic philosophy as the necessary foundation of modern thought. This early encounter with ancient Greek thought provided Hopkins with a philosophical framework through which he could prosecute one of his most fundamental intuitions: that reality is complex, and that it is necessary to pay careful attention to the proper relations between the individual and the whole. It was as he studied these early philosophers that Hopkins first formulated his key concepts of inscape and instress and, more importantly, found the prompt for his own self-consciously modern experiments in verse-writing.