The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

In ‘The Emergence of the Concept in Early Greek philosophy’, André Laks argues that we can trace the first inklings of thinking about concepts by paying close attention to early Greek answers to the following three questions: how is perceptual information reached and processed by the mind, what is the relationship between perception and thinking, and how do the early Greek philosophers account for name-giving? First, Laks discusses whether the explanations of sensory mechanisms offered by the early Greek philosophers as well as by the medical authors might have prepared the ground for later theories of concept formation. Second, he argues that we should resist the Aristotelian report according to which the early Greek philosophers identified thinking with perceiving. In fact, we have good reasons to assume that early Greek philosophers attempted to offer an account of the process of thinking. The final section of the chapter turns to the question of the relationship between giving names to things, and forming and grasping the corresponding concept.

Cicero is well known to provide information about early Roman drama through his frequent references to performances, biographical details and characteristics of playwrights, motifs in dramas, language and style. Most of these comments are integrated into a specific context and therefore reflect Cicero’s argumentative aim. Yet, at the same time, they reveal insights into the nature of Roman Republican drama and its assessment in Cicero’s time. This chapter explores Cicero’s comments on the language, style and rhythm of early Republican dramas as well as his taking up of linguistic features of these plays. By looking at a selection of representative passages, this contribution examines what Cicero says about the language and idioms of early Roman playwrights and analyses whether Cicero takes up any of the linguistic features highlighted or instead opts for alternative versions. Such a study enables a better understanding of the Romans’ own view of the language of their early dramas as well as of any differences and developments between the various playwrights and dramatic genres.

A calculated use of language for deliberate stylistic effects, intended to distinguish epic diction from contemporary speech, characterised formal Latin poetry from the very beginning. This review of early epic language aims to explore the main sources, mechanisms and effects of these first experiments in the creation of a Latin epic style. It is a fact that the epic poets’ record of achievement is obscured by its survival in merely fragmentary form, by the close congruence of epic and tragic styles, and by our own uncertainty about the relative popularity of those two genres and their contemporary influence. Consequently, this study deals less with specifics of epic language than with the process that generated it, as poets experimented with archaisms, calques and neologisms, built upon the practice of their Greek models, and responded to the example of their Latin compatriots. In striving to develop a style worthy of epic, they brought to the task the same confident, competitive spirit that typified all their endeavours, building consciously on the achievement of their predecessors, and in the process leaving something of great value to a wide range of successors.

Chapter 3 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace from an innovative angle. It argues that we gain a better understanding of the motif if we read it against the background of Horace’s literary criticism in the Ars Poetica. In the Ars Poetica, Horace compares a language’s lexical development to leaves falling from a tree: while some words disappear, old ones return. Both the image of leaves and the understanding of time as cyclical are also part of Horace’s poetry of carpe diem. The chapter shows that the poems as well as the individual words of which they consist evoke present enjoyment. The chapter combines innovative work on Horace’s literary criticism with new interpretations of some of Horace’s most famous Odes, including the ode to Leuconoe, C. 1.11. The chapter reveals the importance of Horace’s choice of words for his poetics of presence.