I studied English and French at St John’s College, Oxford, then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, for an MPhil and a PhD in English. My work often focuses on relationship between poetry and forms of knowledge, especially in the field of philosophy, from the Romantics to the present day. How do poets ‘think’ (philosophically or otherwise) with and through their writing? What kind of ethical and epistemic claims arise in the distinctive form of verse, as opposed to the propositional arguments made in prose?

My PhD dissertation, entitled Form’s Philosophy, focused on a short lineage of three poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill – who were especially interested in the relationship between poetry, moral philosophy, and theology. Drawing on a wide range of their influences, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Gillian Rose, I explored how and why these poets believed their work to have some kind of moral or spiritual ‘value’ (Hill’s word); but also, and perhaps more interestingly, how poetry often complicates traditional, moralistic or doctrinal claims about what is good or right. What we find in their poetics, I claim, is a more sophisticated, unsettled kind of moral thinking, full of uncertainty, slipperiness, and self-critique.

Whilst developing my PhD into a book, I’m also beginning to work on a new project about modernist poetics. I’ve recently become interested in a series of loosely connected poets and critics – Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, William Empson, John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, and Joan Retallack – who have written about the cognitive difficulties associated with verse-form: words such as ‘perplexity’, ‘obduracy’, ‘complexity’, and ‘scepticism’ often come up in their work. Why did these features prove so provocative for them? What might we, as readers of poetry, stand to gain from such vertiginous experiences?

At Cambridge, I have taught widely a range of papers (‘1660–1870’, ‘1830–1945’, ‘1847–72’, ‘Lyric’, ‘The Ethical Imagination’, and ‘Practical Criticism and Critical Practice’), and supervised dissertations on Victorian and modernist poetry. I am always keen to hear from students or academics interested in modern poetry, philosophical poetics, the connections between literature and ethics, or any other related questions.