‘The lonely flight of Mind’

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s relationship with modern poetry. While he is very much known as a professional classicist rather than poet, Dodds might still be enlighteningly thought of as a poetical scholar. This is not only in the sense that his scholarship relates to his attempts to write poetry or that he followed in the footsteps of his academic mentor Gilbert Murray. Rather, his academic work was partly informed by the modes of thinking and feeling that were embodied in the work of the modern poets he admired, while his words and ideas also had some impact on certain contemporary poets. The chapter then traces the intertwined relationship between Dodds’s developing scholarly interests—particularly in relation to questions of metaphysics and mysticism—and his engagement with modern poetry in the case of two of the poets he considers to have been the best of his lifetime: W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.

Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field

The canon has long served as a means of controlling the information that the professional classicist, who is facing a vast field of potentially relevant material, can be expected to possess. But recent developments (e.g. the rise of reception studies, a broadened definition of the ancient Mediterranean, comparative antiquities) have put pressure on this strategy. In this chapter we consider the limitations of two possible responses to such a situation—what Sheldon Pollock has called ‘hypercanonicity’, a doubling down on the canon, and ‘hyperinclusivity’, an attempt to encompass everything—before advocating what we call the ‘open field’, an embrace of the many different and singular configurations of knowledge that are coming to define the classicist in the twenty-first century.