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H O P E : A L I T E R A RY H I S TO RY
Hope for us has a positive connotation. Yet it was criticized in classical

antiquity as a distraction from the present moment, as the occasion for
irrational and self-destructive thinking, and as a presumption against
the gods. To what extent do arguments against hope remain useful?
If hope sounds to us like a good thing, that reaction stems from a
progressive political tradition grounded in the French Revolution,
aspects of Romantic literature, and the influence of the Abrahamic
faiths. Ranging both wide and deep, Adam Potkay examines the cases
for and against hope found in literature from antiquity to the present.
Drawing imaginatively on several fields and creatively juxtaposing
poetry, drama, and novels alongside philosophy, theology, and politi-
cal theory, the author brings continually fresh insights to a subject of
perennial interest. This is a bold and illuminating new treatment of a
long-running literary debate as complex as it is compelling.
a da m pot k ay is the William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities

at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His
many books include The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism
(Cambridge University Press, 2007), which in 2009 was awarded
the Harry Levin Prize by the American Comparative Literature
Association for the best book in literary history and criticism pub-
lished between 2006 and 2008, and which has been translated into
several languages.
HOPE
A L I T E R A RY H I S TO RY
ADAM POTKAY
College of William & Mary, Virginia
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316513705
doi: 10.1017/9781009075886
© Adam Potkay 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
isbn 978-1-316-51370-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS
Preface page vii
Introduction: For and Against Hope 1
1 The Limits of Hope in the Ancient World 29

Hesiod and Aeschylus: Prometheus, Pandora,
and the Work of Hope 31
Pindar, Thucydides, and the Fragility of
Good Hope 44
Cyclical Revolution and Ruler Hope 50
Beyond Hope and Fear: The Philosophic Tradition 59
2 Eternal Hope: The Christian Vision 72

Hope for the Poor 75
St. Paul and St. Augustine on Hope, Faith,
Love, and Prayer 80
Gregory of Nyssa’s Eternal Hope 86
The Thomist Tradition on Hope and Despair 90
A Hope for Virgil? 95
Purgatorio: The Thread of Green 102
Paradiso: Surprising Prayers, Certain
Expectation, and the Beatific Vision 107
3 The Three Hopes of Humanism: Sacred,

Profane, and Political 114
Cowley and Crashaw: The Contest “On Hope” 116
Milton: Presumptuous Hope, Aspirational Despair 119
Effective Passions and Social Order:
Hobbes to Mandeville 129
v
Contents
Pope’s Spring of Hope 137

Johnson on Hope and the Empty Present 142
Johnson on Hope and Fear, Prayer and Faith 148
Hope for the Poor and Enslaved 153
4 Something Evermore About to Be: Hope in

the Romantic Era 167
Wordsworth (and Others) on Illicit Hopes
and Eternal Progress 170
Goethe’s Faust: Striving for Its Own Sake 186
Shelley: Hope beyond Hope 198
5 Later Nineteenth-Century Responses to

Romantic Hope 219
John Stuart Mill and Simple Hope 220
George Eliot and the Need of Something Hidden 224
Emily Dickinson: Hope without Hope 230
Dostoevsky: Suicide and Hope 238
Nietzsche: False Hopes vs. “The Highest Hope” 255
6 Modernism: Repetition, Epiphany, Waiting 265

Finding Out What One Hoped For: Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse 268
Waiting (I): Kafka’s The Castle 277
Without Hope or Suicide: Camus’ Myth of
Sisyphus and The Plague 285
A Dream Deferred: Native Son, A Street in
Bronzeville, Invisible Man 295
Waiting (II): Waiting for Godot 317
Notes 325
Acknowledgments 411
Index 414
vi
P R E FAC E
Hope seems to be everywhere. The pop artist Robert

Indiana followed up his iconic “Love” series of the 1960s
with a “Hope” series beginning in 2008. In 2019, I walked
by the six-foot Hope sculpture, steel painted bright red
and blue, then in midtown Manhattan. On lawns where
one once found Christmas “Joy,” “Hope” signs more
often reign, and in 2020 some have remained on display
throughout the seasons. The word appears on bags adver-
tising a Swedish clothing line several museum-goers dis-
played at the Museum of Modern Art. We might say of
hope what the character Gwendolyn says of the Victorian
buzzword “earnest” in Oscar Wilde’s play on the impor-
tance of that word (rather than the virtue it represents):
“it has a music of its own; it produces vibrations.” Hope
for us is as vibratory as it is unclear.
As an emotion, hope was criticized in classical antiquity,
Eastern and Western, as an illusion, a distraction from
the present moment, the occasion for irrational and self-
destructive thinking, and a presumption vis-à-vis God or
the gods: in short, a vice. To what extent do arguments
against hope remain therapeutic or otherwise useful?
Here I have personal testimony, for what it’s worth. I
found support in the classical sources when my late wife,
Monica, was dying from a terminal illness. Her prelim-
inary diagnosis gave her roughly a year of life, and we
accustomed ourselves to this probable timetable, while
vii
Preface
sympathetic to friends who continued to hope for recovery

based on divine intervention or anecdotes about some other
person who had, against the odds, outlived a diagnosis. But
the improbability of any such event, and the empirical evi-
dence of my wife’s decline, led us to eschew hopes or, in my
wife’s case, worldly hopes. We discontinued experimental
medical therapy that her physicians would have extended
because it seemed a prolongation of her suffering and also,
in terms of any utilitarian calculus for how medical dollars
could best be spent, a misuse of public resources. In this
situation, I found helpful the classical arguments against
hope therapeutic, recurring to them often. Monica, a
devout Catholic, died with religious hope, and with tre-
mendous composure, troubled only by moments of anxiety
about not being slated for purgation and salvation. I started
work in earnest on this book as a tribute to her.
Hope is part of our natural makeup. Sometime after
Monica passed away, I started to imagine, as she had
encouraged me to do, new relationships and courses of
life. I started reading newspapers again, something I had
given up – along with any interest in politics – while my
wife was dying. And I rediscovered in the uncertainty
that reigned around me that hopes and fears are practi-
cally unavoidable, temper them as one might with philos-
ophy. We are, partly for our own good, hoping creatures.
But under what conditions can hope be considered an
unqualified good? Only, I believe, as part of religious life.
Or in relation to a progressive political tradition grounded
in the French Revolution, aspects of Romantic literature,
and the prospective orientation of the Abrahamic faiths.
This book examines the cases for and against hope
found in literature from antiquity to the present. My
viii
Preface
use of “literature” is inclusive, in keeping with an earlier

understanding of the term. Poetry, drama, and novels,
mainly in the Western tradition, are at the forefront of
my literary history, but I engage as well with philosophy,
theology, and political theory. My emphases are on the
ancients’ criticism of hope, which I stress to unsettle our
facile trust in it, and on the Romantics’ transformation
of religious hope into something less determinate, more
pervasive, and still very much with us. I have written a
dialectical history of hope, proceeding by point and coun-
terpoint but building toward no clear synthesis or resolu-
tion. In its irresolution it distinguishes itself from earlier
treatments of hope in literature written under the aegis
of Marxist theory, with the clear endpoint of the classless
society of peace, prosperity, and, starting in the 1960s,
disinhibition. This book is only marginally about utopian
writings, which in their finest literary form are not tied
to futures many of us would want.
Hope: A Literary History does not contain a continuous
argument about hope, nor is it a comprehensive history –
on a topic so broad, I don’t believe such a history could be
written. My Introduction is more an overture, announc-
ing the main themes I will develop, than a road map
setting out the exact path I’ll be taking. My subsequent
chapters are roughly chronological, but also thematic.
They span from antiquity and medieval Christianity
through to literary Modernism, with a center of gravity
in nineteenth-century Romanticism. These chapters are
interconnected essays, which can be read independently
of one another, but which illuminate each other and have a
cumulative force. The authors on whom I focus are, quite
simply, those who I’ve found have the most interesting
ix
Preface
things to say about hope, and say them in the most inter-
esting manner. Of course, there are gaps. I hope other
scholars might fill them in, and that my omissions will be
treated as venial rather than as mortal sins.
I began this book as a tribute to a late loved one, and so
it stands. As it happened, I finished the book during the
Covid-19 pandemic, which I hope it will also memorial-
ize. I had all along intended a section on Camus’ novel
The Plague, the story of a North African epidemic and its
hero’s devotion to work without hope of ultimate success.
Suddenly the novel was the subject of essays and op-ed
pieces in venues including the Times Literary Supplement,
New York Times, and Opera News.1 The effects of the pan-
demic on utopian or progressive thought were brilliantly
captured by the Portuguese novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares
in his daily “Plague Diary” for May 2020:
List of utopias
Replacing utopias that occupy a lot of space with micro-
utopias.
A utopia you can carry around in your pocket.
A miniature; capable of being practiced by a solitary little
creature.2
I like the touch of “practicing utopia” – something always

being learned, never achieved. Tavares suggests to me as
well the necessity for working toward a smaller footprint
on the planet, one that if we can’t achieve humanely for
ourselves, nature will accomplish for us.3
Less than three months after the outbreak of coro-
navirus came the resurgence of the US Black Lives
Matter movement alongside civic political unrest that
spilled onto the streets following the death-in-custody
x
Preface
of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. Again, it

seemed the uncanny repetition of what I was writing on:
Ralph Ellison’s depiction, in Invisible Man, of the police
murder of the character Tod Clifton, and the riots that
followed. Some of the more destructive aspects of the
summer-of-2020 riots were apparently incited, according
to the New York Times, by “explicitly violent anarcho-
socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peace-
ful protest.”4 I was now back in the Russia of the 1860s,
Dostoevsky’s Demons in hand. The backlash against hope
among some African-American intellectuals, under the
banner of Afro-pessimism or Black Nihilism, is itself a
dialectical response to the overcharged claims made ear-
lier on behalf of political hope. There are limits on what
(peaceful) hope can and cannot do. Hope can be a motive,
but it can also be a drug.
As a literary scholar, my greatest hope may not be
for the future, but rather in the past, in the great books
which, always receding, reward reengagement. My pious
hope is for the continued ability of the literary achieve-
ments of the past to guide and inspire; to transcend,
if only partially, the catastrophes they may register.5
I learned to curate the Western canon through mas-
ters including Eric Auerbach and A. O. Lovejoy, M. H.
Abrams and Martha Nussbaum, along the way picking
up as many languages as I could. Inviting a still broader
conversation, I have sprinkled my early chapters with
ancient non- (or pre-) Western writing, and also contem-
porary voices. My book ends in the 1950s, however, as I
am most comfortable with authors who wrote before I
was born. I hope others might help me to move the con-
versation forward.
xi
Preface
Let me conclude with part of a poem. No less a pessi-

mist than late Thomas Hardy looks to the past for its con-
tinued ability, however diminished, to feed and restore.
Hope persists in his poem “In Tenebris” (composed
1895–86), through his revived medieval word, “unhope”:
Black is night’s cope;
But death will not appal
One who, past doubtings all,
Waits in unhope.
In Hardy’s wintertime poem of bereavement and empty

heartedness, death is awaited with an unhope that seems
in context not entirely hopeless. The Oxford English
Dictionary gives “unhope,” a word listed as obsolete, four
illustrations, three from sermon literature, 1225–1477, and
the last from Hardy’s poem. In Hardy, the word rhymes
with night’s “cope,” the long ecclesiastical garment worn
by Church of England priests during Holy Communion.
Tied to this garment and sacrament, unhope is not simply
an uncovering or exposure. Its privative “un” preserves
the nominal “hope,” just as the “uncool” of my genera-
tion affirms the cool. There is hope, it seems, just as there
is a Church, ecclesiastical history, English philology, and
the Psalm from which Hardy draws the poem’s Latin
epigraph (in the KJV, “My heart is smitten, and with-
ered like grass”).6 It is hope in the past, not only a lament
for hope that has passed. There is only not hope for the
poem’s speaker in his moment of speaking: a dramatic
situation. In other poems, Hardy attributes hope – as well
as charity and patience – to birds.7 But birds have no such
things without poets.
xii
introduction
For and Against Hope

Is hope a virtue? Not necessarily. We hope for many

things, some of them good, some bad. What we do or
don’t do about our hopes may also reflect on us, for better
or for worse. One might hope for world peace or an end
to poverty, and these appear to be worthy if improbable
objects. Yet hoping for such things is not a good, or much
of a good, in and of itself. Merely passive hope scarcely
seems a virtue; it may appear an idle daydream. Hope
for the good becomes meritorious when coupled with
exertion: “I am hopefully helping, in my small way, to
make good things happen.” Conversely, hope, passive or
active, can be for bad or morally dubious things: “I hope
he breaks a leg.” Not that all people would find this a bad
hope. Hope for revenge may seem perfectly acceptable,
and failure to avenge a slight dishonorable or shameful.
There are hopes that fewer would condone: for instance, in
President Truman’s account, the Nazis’ “hope to enslave
the world.”1 Yet people can and do hope for the success
of persecuting regimes, the elimination of foes and for-
eigners. Envy, hatred, revenge, self-aggrandizement, and
injustice are no less salient as motives and objects of hop-
ing than their opposing virtues.
Is hope pleasurable or comforting? Again, not nec-
essarily. It may sometimes be, as reflected in Samuel
Johnson’s definition of the word in A Dictionary of the
English Language (1755): “Expectation of some good; an
1
Introduction: For and Against Hope
expectation indulged with pleasure” (definition 1). That

expectation typically falls short of certainty. We also
desire the things for which we hope.2 This desire is itself,
arguably, pleasurable. Johnson may be drawing for his
definition of hope on Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, where
desire involves pleasure: “whether we are remembering
desires that were satisfied in the past or looking forward
to their satisfaction in the future, we do feel a kind of
pleasure.”3 Ancient Greek metaphors often present hope
(elpis) as a sweet and warm feeling.4 Emily Dickinson,
in one of the best-known poems on hope (“Hope is the
thing with feathers”), reifies it as “the little bird / That
kept so many warm.” But sometimes hope doesn’t feel
like anything at all. Jayne M. Waterworth maintains that
hope is not clearly an emotion, as it lacks the “character-
istic feelings” associated with other emotions: for exam-
ple, “cowering in fear.”5 Contra Aristotle, Waterworth
argues that it is not “necessarily the case that one who
hopes should experience any hedonic tone at all” (57).
We can go further: hope may not only not involve plea-
sure but, rather, involve anxiety and pain. As a Google
search amply reveals, poets invoke “anxious hope” and
“fearful hope.” The protagonist of an Olga Tokarczuk
novel reflects: “I still had hope but it was a stupid hope,
so painful.”6
But my examples so far have treated an agent’s hopes for
herself. What about hopes in as well as for others? As good
and generous as such hopes may sound, even they are not
necessarily virtuous. Dickens’s novel Great Expectations
shows how selfish and wrong hopes for o thers – here,
children – can be. Miss Havisham, in revenge for being
jilted on her wedding day, raises her adopted heir Estella
2
to be an icy femme fatale. Magwitch has afforded Pip the

financial (though not the moral) means to be a metropoli-
tan gentleman, but his expressed hope in Pip’s gentleman
status boils down to wanting to own something better
than the fine horses of his social superiors in Australia.7
Havisham and Magwitch both produce monsters, though
as their hopes in them fail so fades the monstrosity of
their creatures. The novel shows that the hopes we have
for others can be the opposite of disinterested or benefi-
cial.8 They are, emphatically, our hopes. The most moral
character in Dickens’s novel is Pip’s older brother-in-law,
and surrogate father, Joe Gargery, who has no particular
hopes for Pip: toward him he has only love, benevolence,
and a sense of duty bound to village life and the rural
past. Hope for the future is thus, for Joe, hope in the past:
his child with Biddy will be named after his first-fostered
child, Pip. It is a narrative moment when, to use Seamus
Heaney’s phrase, “hope and history rhyme.”9
Yet even history, or things in the past, can be hoped
for. Hopes can address things we hope may have hap-
pened but about which we are unaware. “I hope she came
through surgery,” one can reflect, long after surgery is
over. Such hopes can be tinged with anxiety on account
of their belatedness. Or they can be merely polite, as in
this exchange in Great Expectations between Pip, now a
gentleman, and the convict Magwitch, his secret (at this
stage) benefactor:
“How are you living?” I asked him.
“I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides,
away in the new world [Australia],” said he: “many a thou-
sand mile of stormy water off from this.”
“I hope you have done well?”
3
“I’ve done wonderful well. There’s others went out alonger

me as has done well too, but no man has done nigh as well
as me. I’m famous for it.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”10
Pip expresses a hope in the past and then gratification

that what he desired has come to pass. Magwitch count-
ers with a hope in the future that at first seems unac-
countable, hoping to hear what he has already heard.
(This mystery will soon be solved: he hopes to hear of
Pip’s gladness once Pip learns that he, Magwitch, has
been his benefactor.)
Evidently, the passion of hoping is complicated in its
morality, affect, even temporality. Hope depends for its
moral status and hedonic tone (if any) on a variety of con-
texts, including the particularities of what is hoped for,
the likelihood of attaining what is desired, and how an
agent acts or does not act on her hopes. Why, then, is hope
apt to sound like a simple and immediate good to many
people? If hope appears an unqualified good to you, inde-
pendent of any specific context, it is likely for one of two
reasons:
1. You belong to or have been influenced by one of the

Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), in
which faith-based hope counts as a virtue.
2. You are a political liberal who hopes for greater
justice, conceive of it as you may – and the fuzzier your
conception, the better hope may sound. Starting with
supporters of the French Revolution, and extending
through Barack Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster, hope has
served as shorthand for progressive politics.
4
Because hope’s positive connotations are now prevalent

in the West, I start my literary history with the classi-
cal counterpoint, in which hope is at best problematic,
something in need of regulation and restraint if not
extirpation. I later turn to Judeo-Christianity, and then
European and American Romanticism, and offer a pre-
liminary sketch – to be filled in by subsequent chapters –
of the reasons why hope features as a good thing in these
overlapping but distinct contexts, religious and politi-
cal. Since the rise of Christianity, hope has been a dou-
ble-edged concept: on one hand, it is a worldly passion
or emotion, and its contrary is either fear or despair.11 As
an emotion (or an emotion-like motive), hope was widely
criticized in classical antiquity through the Renaissance
and Enlightenment as an illusion and presumption, a dis-
traction from the present moment, the occasion for irra-
tional and self-destructive thinking. On the other hand,
within Christianity hope of a specific kind is one of three
theological virtues, and its opposite, despair, is the unfor-
givable sin. As a theological virtue – the anticipation of
sharing eternally in the glory of God – hope is always a
good thing in Christian cultures, and more generally in
the Abrahamic faiths.
In this Introduction, as in the book it forecasts, I first
establish the classical case against hope. I then exam-
ine the theological case for hope, and the ongoing ten-
sions between these two competing frames of reference.
After attending to the Enlightenment transformation of
hope, along with the other passions, into a morally neu-
tral, motivational psychology, I focus on the grander
claims made on its behalf during and after the French
Revolution. Hope becomes in the Romantic era a new,
5
semi-secularized virtue: the hope for more life, a better

or perfected condition of the individual, the nation, or of
the species, in time or eternity. This new and indetermi-
nate hope often directs us toward a receding horizon, be
it imaginative, ethical, or political. Romantic-era authors
direct us beyond clear conceptualization: for example,
Friedrich Schiller’s “we were born for something better”;
William Wordsworth’s “something evermore about to
be”; Percy Shelley’s hope for “arts, though unimagined,
yet to be.” Turning to the twentieth century, I address
the attenuation of hope in literary Modernism before and
after Auschwitz, including Kafka’s tragicomic narratives
of “vanishingly small, almost non-existent hope,” and the
impatience with hopeful waiting expressed in post-Har-
lem Renaissance writing. I conclude with Samuel Beckett’s
tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, and its futile but enabling
hope for the Messiah who does not come.
As surprising as it may seem to us today, for thousands
of years many if not most writers viewed hope with sus-
picion or outright disapproval. Personal hopes, claimed
sages from Mesopotamia to China, Socrates to the Stoics,
typically involve unworthy or impious objects and thus,
whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, end in disappointment
if not disaster. Vain human hopes or wishes – hope and
wish, we will see, are closely linked concepts12 – include
those for riches, reputation, remembrance, or significant
worldly improvement. It may be acceptable in difficult
situations to endorse good outcomes, but it is better not
to hope, taking hope to have emotional force.
The case against hope sometimes derives from one
of two conservative assumptions: first, that we should
not desire what the gods have not given us; or, second,
6
what history shows to be impossible. The first of these

is prominent in one of Pindar’s odes from the fifth cen-
tury bce, which revisits the myth of the healer Asklepios,
who seeks to bring a man back from the dead. Pindar
condemns “hunting impossibilities on the wings of inef-
fectual hopes.”13 Asklepios’ hope is impious, impossible,
and punished as such. But even without the gods, history
teaches humility through its repetitive and all-effacing
force. All things pass, and all things recur. The crooked
cannot be made straight. Nothing satisfies for long and
nothing will be remembered. The historical case against
hopes or wishes appears strongly in Ecclesiastes, an out-
lying book of the Hebrew Bible:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new
thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said,
See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was
before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither
shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come
with those that shall come after.
I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem … I have
seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all
is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot
be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be num-
bered. (1:9–15)
The wishes we have, from generation to generation, are

for objects that are distributed not according to merit
and justice but rather “time and chance” (9:11), and, if
attained, bring no enduring satisfaction: such are power,
wealth, palaces, aesthetic delights, long life, and wisdom
itself (1:18). The characteristic advice of Ecclesiastes
is to work or apply oneself, not with an eye to ultimate
7
accomplishment, but rather to be able to enjoy the simple

pleasures of the present, “to eat, and to drink and to be
merry” within a family setting (8:15).14
Hope appears symptomatic of human ignorance
and impotence across Greek literature. Even Homer’s
Odysseus, the avatar of effort and expectation, foresight
and craft, who succeeds in returning home from war after
twenty years away, errs under the sway of hope. He stays
his men in the Cyclops’ den for the exciting guest-gift
he imagines might come his way. The Cyclops, lacking
all sense of hospitality, promptly eats two of Odysseus’
men (Odyssey, Book 9). In Hesiod’s Works and Days,
Pandora’s jar scatters a host of evils (prominently, labor
and sickness), preserving hope alone. Is hope another
evil, perhaps the greatest of evils – or the last remaining
good, an antidote to evils – or, somehow, both? Pandora
and her jar are Zeus’s way of redressing the stolen gift
of fire Prometheus bestows on mankind, and in Greek
thought Prometheus remains another ambiguous figure.
In Aeschylus’s drama Prometheus Bound, the Titan gives
mankind “blind hope,” a hope that blinds them, in par-
ticular, to their future deaths: is this a blessing or curse?
What of the deliberations of cities or peoples who must
make life-or-death decisions without foresight? In the
Melian Dialogue of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War (Book
5), the people of Melos place their hope for deliverance
from Athenian might in the gods, in justice, and in their
allied neighbors – and meet with terrible devastation.
The vanity of most or all hopes is commonplace in
the Stoic and Epicurean philosophical traditions and the
Latin poetry they inspired. The Stoic Seneca, in his more
temperate moods, recommends, “let us restrict the range
8
of hope” in order to avoid disappointment and anger.15

Less moderately, he advises against hope entirely: “cease
to hope … and you will cease to fear.”16 Boethius con-
curs in The Consolation of Philosophy (Book 1, poem 7,
lines 27–31): “Fly from hope and sorrow. The mind is
clouded, bridled and bound, where these things reign.”17
For Horace, in Ode 1.11, the uncertainty and brevity
of life preclude “long hopes” (spem longam), and so he
famously counsels, “seize the day, trusting the future as
little as possible” (“carpe diem, quam minimum credula
postero”).18 These quotations remain commonplaces
through the Renaissance and eighteenth century; carpe
diem is one of the few Latin tags widely known today.
Two generic exceptions to the classical case against hope
would seem to be (1) the golden-age scenarios of Greek and
Roman literature, recursions to a just natural state where
property and labor will either vanish or become less divi-
sive and less strenuous; and (2) the Greek-language novels
of the Roman era, which reward, after many arduous tri-
als, the reunion hopes of two virtuous lovers, who then
live happily ever after. Both cases, however, are fanciful,
self-consciously literary creations. Of the five complete
Greek novels (including, most famously, the Aethiopika
and Daphnis and Chloe), Laurel Fulkerson notes that in
any case only the central lovers have their hopes fulfilled,
while ancillary characters (other suitors, parents) are left
frustrated.19 In poems of golden age recovery, including
parts of Hesiod’s Works and Days (lines 109–20, 213–37)
and Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, exhortations to greater justice
in the present are only clothed in representations of the
past. Virgil’s new golden age dialectically preserves the
most refined luxury of his day – for example, sheep will
9
spontaneously change their fleeces to purple and saffron

(42–45) – in a way that is the more appealing for being
more flamboyantly impossible. If hope is desire for the
possible, then neither the early novel nor the golden age
recursion reflects it.
The classical case against hope may be divided into five
main points:
1. Hope is fundamentally deceptive, based on an

uncertain future that rarely arrives as we imagine it.
It wrongly sets imagination over the testimony of eyes
and ears.
2. Hope is morally corrosive because most things that most
people hope for are or tend to be unworthy, unsatisfying,
impious, and harmful, including riches, unstinting
sensual pleasure, fame, beauty, glory, and long (or
endless) life. The loci classici for this theme in the West
are Ecclesiastes and Juvenal’s tenth Satire (the latter has
spirited English translations by Henry Vaughan, John
Dryden, and Samuel Johnson), though it underwrites as
well the satiric aspect of utopian fiction from More to
Huxley. The ephemerality or illusive nature of most or
all human hopes and wishes also features prominently
in classical Indian (Brahman, Hindu, Buddhist) and
Chinese (Confucian, neo-Confucian) philosophies.
3. Considered as a passion, hope is, like all the passions
(love, fear, anger, etc.), something in relation to
which we are passive. We have either no control or
insufficient control over it. Therefore, in hoping we
compromise or lose our rational agency.
4. As a corollary to point 3, susceptibility to hope – which
may seem a better emotion than others – makes us
10
susceptible to the negative future-oriented emotion of

fear, as well as the negative present-oriented emotion
of sorrow or disappointment.
5. Hope in the future alienates us from something over
which we have some control: the enjoyment and/or
proper use of the present day.
Horace enshrines this last point in one of his best-known

odes, here in John Dryden’s eighteenth-century couplet
translation:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine,
The joys I have possess’d, in spite of fate are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.20
Heaven may not have further power over what has

past, but it has more or less shaping power over what is to
come. In Judeo-Christian tradition, hope in future salva-
tion becomes a religious virtue. No classical moralist con-
sidered it such. Only in post-World War II literature (for
example, Viktor Frankl) and some contemporary philoso-
phy (Luc Bovens, Victoria McGeer, Nancy Snow) is hope
tentatively explored as a possible secular value or virtue.21
In the Bible, however, hope is central to the moral and
devotional life of a God-infused community. The Hebrew
Scriptures feature both waiting (words derived from yhl)
for the Lord, a stance of expectation that may be positive,
and active and tense hoping (kvh), its object more often
11
than not being God’s justice.22 “Faith inaugurates a duty

to hope,” writes Alan Mittleman; “where there is faith,
then, there are always good grounds for hope.”23 Hope
is both individual and collective: individuals, and the
Israelite people, hope alike for justice, including redress
for the poor; an unbroken or restored relationship with
God; divine help against persecution and suffering; and,
not least, an inspired leader and enduring kingdom.
Biblical hope is often, as in most cases of non-religious
hope, a hope for the realization of some future event or
state of affairs (or hope that x). Yet the Bible also reveals
another conceptual-linguistic aspect of hoping: hope in
someone, crucially but not only the Lord. The Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) presents this second sense of
hope as being distinct from but somehow “mixed” with
the word’s primary meaning (desirous expectation):
“Feeling of trust or confidence. Obsolete except as biblical
archaism, with mixture of sense 1.” The OED adduces
John Wycliffe’s early translation of the Bible: “His hope
[is] in the Lord his God” (Psalms 146:5); the King James
Bible renders the complete verse, “Happy is he that hath
the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD
his God.” This hope in the Lord is at once trust in him
and, as the OED suggests, an expectation and desire for
some good from him. The obsolescence of this sense
of hope is questionable. Don’t we still have hopes in as
well as for others, particularly loved ones? Loved ones in
whom we feel confident, and from or for whom we desire
something good?
In the Hebrew Bible, collective hope may be in an
anointed future king, the Messiah (in Greek translation,
the Christ) who will reign over a restored or perfected
12
nation or Mediterranean world (see, for example, Isaiah

9:1–7). According to the New Testament, the messiah
has already arrived in the person of Jesus Christ, and he
will come again in power and glory to usher in the final
judgment and institute, for his elect (who overlap with
the poor), a new and perfected world. In the time prepa-
ratory to this second coming, the three crucial virtues
for Christians – the three so-called theological virtues –
are faith, hope (Greek elpis, Latin spes), and spiritual love
(translated in the King James Bible as “charity,” from the
Latin caritas). Saint Paul’s best-known words are these
from 1 Corinthians 13:12–13: “For now we see through
a glass, darkly [dimly, imperfectly]; but then [at the end
time, in an afterlife] face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now
abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest
of these is charity.” One reason for love’s superiority is
that, by most counts, it alone will abide in God’s eter-
nal presence, once faith in things unseen and hope for
their unfolding in time are no longer needed. Now, in
this life, hope is a virtue because it involves a deliberate
choice, the choice of confidence in God and his promise.
Although any relationship to the future involves us
in uncertainty, people of faith may consider eternal life
a certain outcome, which involves an apparent paradox
and the subordination of hope to faith. Dante, toward the
end of his Divine Comedy, recounts his comprehension, in
Paradise, of the true meaning of hope (derived from the
theologian Peter Lombard):
“Hope,” I said, “is the certain expectation
of future glory, springing
from heavenly grace and merit we have won.”24
13
Hope’s religious opposite is despair, often interpreted as

the unspecified, unforgivable sin of the Gospels (Matthew
12:31–32). To despair is to abandon all merit and all
possibility of grace (unmerited favor), and divine hope,
once lost, is forever denied to one. In Dante, the words
inscribed on the gate to Hell conclude: “ABANDON
ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.”25 A ques-
tion his work raises, however, is whether or not there
might be a hope beyond hope for some of those in Hell
– in particular, Dante’s guide Virgil, one of the virtuous
pagans who lived before Christian revelation. According
to some early theologians – Origen and St. Gregory of
Nyssa – salvation will, in the fullness of time, come to
everyone, even Satan himself. There is hope for all.
Historically, hope as a theological virtue sits uneas-
ily besides hope as a worldly emotion. As an emotion or
motive, hoping is dogged by classical disapprobation into
the nineteenth century. In the Christian era there are
two hopes just as there are two loves, carnal and spiritual,
particular and universal, a division (or continuum) rooted
in Diotima’s ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium and elab-
orated up to the present day.26 Yet while the philosophi-
cal and literary-historical literature on love is extensive,
the two hopes are as yet largely innocent to analysis. My
book is the first properly literary history of hope.27In its
worldly guise, hope appears suspect even as it becomes an
element of the egoistic psychology developed by Thomas
Hobbes and popularized by English writers as diverse as
Addison, Mandeville, and Samuel Johnson. According to
this psychology, hope is a more or less neutral mecha-
nism for moving the self-concerned individual forward
in time from one temporary satisfaction to the next. As
14
Addison will put it in one of his broadly popular Spectator

essays (1712): “we have no sooner gained one Point but
we extend our Hopes to another.”28 Hopes keep us going,
individually, with no end or final aim in sight. It is a func-
tional good if not a moral one. Homiletically, it remains
subordinate to faith-based hope.
The early modern period also gives rise to utopian lit-
erature, but this literature should not be seen as a simple
expression of worldly things hoped for. The genre is rooted
in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and the primary mean-
ing of More’s coinage is from the Greek for “no place”
(ou + topos), with a possible pun on “good place” (eu + topos).
“No place” forecloses hope’s condition of possible attain-
ment, and thus Utopia takes its impossible place alongside
Tao Quin’s “Peach Blossom Spring,” the medieval Land
of Cockaigne, and the hobo folk song “Big Rock Candy
Mountain.” Moreover, utopias, far from being desirable,
are at least partly repellant, from Cockaigne and More’s
Utopia to, a fortiori, later instantiations such as Book
Four of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels (the island
of rationalist-anarchist horses, or Houyhnhnms, who
are not without their own racial hierarchies and geno-
cidal tendencies) to Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon (where
criminals are treated as ill and the ill as criminals) and
the mandatory hedonism of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World (1932). William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere;
or, An Epoch of Rest (where not only private property van-
ishes, but so do the differences between work and art) has
discomfited progressive readers with its idealized rural
stasis. All these utopias contain sufficient internal contra-
dictions and weaknesses that disclose their flawed status
to the careful reader. Each has divided readers into those
15
who find it, on balance, attractively communal, and those

who find it limiting or repressive.29 The former camp may
find in the utopian genre a source of political hope. In
the French Revolutionary period, for example, William
Godwin saw Swift’s Houyhnhnms as a fore-image of the
perfection of mankind.30 But such an act of reading may
say more about certain kinds of readers than about the
authors whose works they read. Fredric Jameson, emi-
nence grise of Marxist political theory, concedes that
given literary utopias’ “structural ambiguities,” the critic
sympathetic with utopian desires might adopt “the slogan
of anti-anti-Utopianism.”31
That utopias can sometimes be read as instantiations
of hope is due to the Revolution and its literary counter-
part, Romanticism. What we now think of as political
hope is, arguably, a product of the French Revolution:
hope in the socially transformative power of represen-
tative government, as distinct from prophetic hope in a
future ruler. Granted, calls for social justice have biblical
roots in the Hebrew prophets and the gospels, but jus-
tice in the Bible is different from what it becomes in the
French Revolution, specifically in the political writings
of Francois-Noel Babeuf.32 The justice that prophets like
Amos and Isaiah urge their listeners to seek more or less
accords with the ancient Greek definition of justice as
giving to each person his due, what he deserves by inher-
ited rank and status as well as any personal accomplish-
ment. This justice bends to mercy chiefly in the form of
alms to widows and orphans, the clear losers in a clearly
patriarchal society. But to the French Revolution dates
social justice, as we now tend to understand it: the pub-
lic distribution of goods irrespective of individual merits
16
or desert, in the service of relative equality and social

solidarity.
The connection of hope to moral and political prog-
ress was first made by Immanuel Kant in writings pub-
lished between Rousseau’s Social Contract and the early
years of the Revolution. For Kant, just as we cannot know
whether or not the soul is immortal, we cannot know if
there is progress in history. Nonetheless, Kant finds the
postulates of immortality and progress morally valuable
as motives for striving toward self-perfection (which
will take an indefinitely long time) and the perfection of
internal and external state relations, perpetual peace.33
Political hope has had a special appeal, over the past
230 years, to young persons – starting, famously, with the
great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who
wrote of his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy,

For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!34
Two things for which Wordsworth hoped were the elim-

ination of abject poverty and the British slave trade.
In these hopes, he joined a small chorus of later eigh-
teenth-century writers, including working-class poets
and the Black Atlantic writer Olaudah Equiano. However,
part of why political hope appeals so much is, I think, its
aspect of indeterminacy – although it may have determi-
nate objects (the elimination of poverty, legal or material
equality, etc.), it also tends to exceed them, to become an
attitude of general hopefulness toward general, unspecific
17
changes and improvements. The hopes of youth are often

indeterminate – a hopefulness without clear or consistent
objects – and so are those of progressive politics. Nor,
according to the Romantic account, should hope have a
clear or determinate object or aim. For Wordsworth, the
inability of experience to live up to our hopes proves not
that our hopes are unreasonable, but rather that “Our
destiny, our nature, and our home, / Is with infinitude –
and only there; / With hope it is, hope that can never die,
/ Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something
evermore about to be” (The Prelude 6:538–42).
Hope thus becomes a new, semi-secularized virtue:
the hope for more life, a better or perfected condition
of the individual, political society, or the species, in time
or eternity. This new and indeterminate hope directs us
toward a receding horizon. It aims beyond any immediate
hope, and beyond conceptualization. Emily Dickinson,
Wordsworth’s great heir as a poet of interminable hope,
suggests its affective call, seemingly independent of clear
or present semantic content:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –35
Part of the reason it never stops is that satisfaction is not

achievable in the “actual” world, a point Dickinson makes
in a subsequent poem:
Within its reach, though yet ungrasped
Desire’s perfect Goal –
No nearer – lest the Actual –
Should disenthrall thy soul –
18
Our presumed attraction to the ever-out-of-reach, the

thing enjoyed in imagination only, is proof for Schiller
(“Hoffnung,” “Hope”) that “we were born for something
better” (“zu was besserm sind wir gebohren”).36 Goethe’s
Faust strives upward perpetually, even in heaven.37 Percy
Shelley imagines a resurrected hope that realizes its object
beyond its own “wreck” or creates that object imagina-
tively in its very failure, urging us “to hope, till Hope cre-
ates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”38 Do
any of these authors believe in an assured or even possible
afterlife? They tend to entertain the possibility, at least
intermittently, and so have appealed to readers with as
well as without religious faith. Romantic-era hope, based
on intuition, does not displace faith-based theological
virtues, but it does supplement or vie with them. It thus
figures in what Charles Taylor identifies as the modern
differentiation between religious and secular modes of
authority.39
Key to Romanticism is an attempt to salvage as virtues
hope and love (as well as joy, a Pauline fruit of the spirit),
while sidestepping or repudiating Christian faith. Can
Dante’s dance of the three virtues (Purgatorio XXIX),
with faith or love (never hope) taking the lead, become a
dance of just two, love and hope? Whether such a proj-
ect is philosophically possible is debatable. Can there be
categorical love of neighbor independent of a God who
guarantees the worth of every neighbor? Can faith in
man replace faith in God (defined as the perfect object of
faith)? Such a faith must be based on no promise or ante-
rior condition, but rather a hope that man might be made
worthy of love, in a possible future very different from the
here and now. A conservative religious response would
19
be that hope and love are incoherent as virtues without

faith in the order and justice of the cosmos. The German
jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde famously wrote in
1964, “The liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites
[such as the interior regulation and moral substance of
individuals] which it cannot guarantee itself.”40 It could
be argued that secularized Romanticism lives by similar
unguaranteed prerequisites. Yet what enlivens it, as a lit-
erary mode, is not of course philosophical rigor, but sty-
listic vigor. It is one thing to apostrophize hope and love,
exalting them in odes and hymns, and quite another to
explain why they are good things in the first place.
Artistically, the Romantics also rely on the drama of
Christian autobiography, from Augustine’s Confessions
to John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
“Hope and dejection,” M. H. Abrams claimed, are cen-
tral to Romantic writing and its post-Enlightenment
“reversion to … the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals
of the Christian inner life, … the extremes of destruction
and creation, hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death
and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and paradise
regained.”41 Thus, Dickinson’s indefinite hope counter-
poises her erotic-religious suffering and recourse to “the
White Sustenance – / Despair –.” Wordsworth’s hope
in “something evermore about to be” arises in narrative
context from the dejection he experienced in crossing the
Alps without being aware of it, an immense anti-climax to
imaginative expectation. At the time of his poem’s com-
position his greater disappointment was with the violent
course of the French Revolution under Robespierre, lead-
ing to an “utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope
for.” Along the way, studying the rationalist-anarchist
20
philosopher William Godwin did not help: “Sick, wea-

ried out with contrarieties, / [I] Yielded up moral ques-
tions in despair.”42 Within Romanticism, hope and
futurity are in close interchange with the traumas and
tragedy of the past. “Melancholic hope,” a term which
Joseph R. Winters applies to an African-American liter-
ary tradition grounded in W. E. B. Du Bois, applies to
the Romantics as well: it is far from facile optimism.43
In the wake of Romanticism, the nineteenth-century
English novel continues to pit hope against the stricture
of things as they are. The politics of the novel, Dickens
to Trollope, Austen to Eliot, tends in classic liberal mode
to aim at liberation from ossified injustices, chief among
them glaring inequalities and prejudices of rank, gen-
der, and wealth. The realist novel is thus, in the main,
“progressive” – yet it records as well what is lost in the
march of liberalism. Liberationist history almost always
seems good in light of “freedom from x” but sometimes
looks different from the point of view of “freedom to do
y.” While it is uncontroversial that freedom from de facto
as well as de jure slavery, twelve-hour working days, and
patriarchal oppression are good things, emerging from
points of resistance in the past, more problematic is what
people are freed to do. To kill others, in Dostoevsky’s
novels; to kill oneself.
Nietzsche nodded to the valor of suicide in situations
recognized as hopeless. He sees the remnant in Pandora’s
jar as the greatest of evils: “Zeus did not want human
beings, however much tormented by the other evils they
might be, to throw away their lives, but instead to con-
tinue letting themselves be tormented anew. Hence, he
gives hope to humanity: it is in truth the worst of evils
21
because it lengthens their agony.”44 Hope attaches us

to life even in situations where the superior soul would
throw it away. Yet in his early essay “On the Utility and
Liability of History for Life,” Nietzsche presents as a basis
of hope the imprudent achievements of the great souls of
the past, exemplars who show us the beautiful possibilities
of life.45 From The Gay Science onwards, Nietzsche praises
“the highest hope,” which seems to be for self-discovery
or self-creation, becoming who one authentically is. He
bequeaths this hope to French existentialism, as well as to
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator dis-
covers that, apart from scripted roles for who he should be,
“I am nobody but myself.” This discovery, in the novel’s
chronology, is anticipated by the tragicomic sharecropper,
Jim Trueblood: “while I’m singin’ them blues I makes up
my mind that I ain’t nobody but myself and ain’t nothin’ I
can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen.”46
Work without hope is another Modernist theme, one
set in early motion by Emily Dickinson. Dickinson hovers
between valuing, on the one hand, hope without attain-
ment, and on the other, service without hope. The value of
work without hope, at least in any ultimate goal or reward,
is later developed by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of
Sisyphus, which endorses living without either hope or, as
a response to hopelessness, suicide – a topic he r eexamines
with greater complexity in his novel The Plague.
Modernism ushers in as well the tragicomedy of dimin-
ished hopes. A haunting image of a maimed “Hope”
appears in George Frederic Watts’s symbolist painting
of 1886: personified hope, blindfolded and head sadly
bowed, sits atop a planet, plucking the one unbroken
string of a harp.
22
Hope (1886), George Frederic Watts, Tate Britain.

Digital photo: Photo copyright Tate.
23
Modernists from Kafka to Beckett focus on the slender

hopes of small souls, straggling forward toward objects
of dubious worth or reality. Kafka’s fictive world features
characters seeking acknowledgment or redress from hid-
den sources of political or divine authority with “vanish-
ingly small, almost non-existent hope” (The Castle).47 In
response to his friend Max Brod’s query about whether
there was hope outside of the world that we know, Kafka
famously replied, “Plenty of hope – for God unlimited
hope. Only not for us.”48 Beckett’s tramps daily await the
never-coming of Godot. Tragicomic repetition suspends
narrative progress, and minimal differentiations take the
place of moral or political transformations. Epiphanies
may interrupt the monotony – my chief examples will
come from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – but no
theophany puts an end to the endless waiting for mean-
ing or salvation.
Shortly after Woolf’s suicide in March 1941, the Nazis
started building extermination camps on Polish soil. In
a way that has yet to be appreciated, literature is polar-
ized by conflicting responses to the role of hope in the
Shoah or Holocaust. Was hope the only possible expres-
sion of value and of faith, or was it a part of the calamity?
Tadeusz Borowski, in “Auschwitz: Our Home” (1946),
takes the latter view. Borowski’s bitter address to his con-
temporaries is tinged with self-reproach as a survivor of
the camp:
Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be
different. For a better world to come when all this is over …
Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is
possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could
stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very
24
hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas cham-

bers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into
numb inactivity … Never before in the history of mankind
has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so
much harm as it has in the war, in this concentration camp. We
were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today
we perish in gas chambers.49
Borowski’s argument is that in the camps despair or,

better, desperation would have been more useful or effec-
tive than hope. Although hope may be connected to
agency, Borowski asks us to imagine hopelessness, in a
hopeless situation (if one can assuredly be perceived as
such), as a superior motivation, because what may have
been required was risking everything recklessly, rising up
against armed oppressors with sheer numbers, without the
future-oriented drive of self-preservation. He sees hope,
by contrast, as paralysis. As in Nietzsche, hope becomes
the worst of evils, because it prolongs torments; as with
Thucydides’ Melians, it brings about a people’s cata-
strophic destruction. Borowski’s implicit counterpoint to
personal hope is mass revolt, or collective thinking more
generally. In 1948, Borowski joined the Soviet-controlled
Polish Workers Party. Disillusioned with the Party and
its strong-arm tactics, he committed suicide in 1951.
By contrast, hope is a crucial value in Viktor Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy,
originally titled, in German (Vienna, 1946), Nevertheless
say “Yes” to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration
Camp. Frankl asserts the value of hope in a “practically
hopeless situation”: “They must not lose hope but should
keep their courage in the certainty that the hopeless-
ness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity
25
and meaning.”50 Frankl prompts the philosopher Jayne

Waterworth to see “hope as a symbolic act embodying
meaning. That is, even if camp inmates believed that
death was inevitable, and they also believed that any
struggle was vain in terms of saving themselves, they
could nevertheless hope that their deaths would not be
in vain, individually, collectively or historically.” Such a
hope is for others, in a positive sense: others who might
survive and say “Never again.” Frankl’s “expressive
hope,” Waterworth concludes, “persists to express value
in the face of … catastrophe.”51
Václav Havel, imprisoned from 1979 to 1983 for his
human rights activity in Communist Czechoslovakia,
defined hope as a practice rather than a prediction. Hope
is “an ability to work for something because it is good,
not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more
unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope,
the deeper the hope is … [Hope] is not the conviction
that something will turn out well, but the certainty that
something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”52
By the end of 1989, one-party rule in Czechoslovakia
came to an end, and Havel was democratically elected
president of the new state.
In the United States, hope for the future often looks
back to Enlightenment-era civic promises. The enslaved,
disenfranchised, and dispossessed have especially hoped
for the full realization of Jefferson’s “self-evident truths”
in the Declaration of Independence: “that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In the court-
room scene of Richard Wright’s Native Son, the character
26
Boris Max invokes these truths. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man refers to them as “the principle” and considers that
it is his family legacy “to affirm the principle, which they
[the Founders] themselves had dreamed into being out
of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past.”53 But how
long could the dream of equal rights be deferred? How
long would Blacks (be told to) wait? Gwendolyn Brooks
expresses the frustration of hope with no or little prog-
ress: “No man can give me any word but Wait, / The
puny light.”54
The history, and the promise of an earlier history, lies
behind Barack Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster. Designed
by artist Shepard Fairey, the campaign poster represents
Obama in beige and blues, above the word “hope” or,
in alternative printings, “progress” or “change.” Hope,
in this context, is hope for change, and by implication
the relevant change in some way combines eliminating
or alleviating poverty, and ensuring legal if not eco-
nomic equality for all citizens, in particular for African
Americans.55 The hope announced by Obama’s 2006 book
The Audacity of Hope and by his iconic campaign poster
is ameliorative and open-ended, but Obama fulfilled
one key hope of his supporters in the very fact of being
elected, as a person of African ancestry, US President.
The election result felt like either justice itself or a large
step toward it. Hope came into focus as a democratic civic
virtue.56
But in more recent years the case against hope has been
revived by intellectuals of color disaffected with political
process and skeptical about the possibility to transcend,
at least peacefully, systemic racism and injustice. Roxane
Gay, in “The Case against Hope,” argues modestly for
27
activism, and against passive hope.57 Compare Mary

Rambo’s advice to the narrator in Invisible Man: “Don’t
hope, make it that way.”58 But the argument has been made
more rhetorically, with sound and fury. The nay-saying
to hope and its politics has produced injunctions to “f*ck
with” oppressive structures (Miguel A. De La Torre)
and to “truly end the world itself ” (Calvin L. Warren). For
De La Torre, a theologian, “embracing hopelessness”
involves activist hope, call it what one will: he calls it
“radical liberative praxis.”59 Warren begins by rejecting
political hope of a Romantic variety – “the Politics of
hope recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph,
and lack as propinquity” – but ends by asserting the abso-
lute hopelessness of overcoming racism: “it is impossible
to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the
world,” because “the world depends on black death to sus-
tain itself.”60 Is the better hope, then, to end the world?
That’s nihilism for sure. Sadly, however, we’re already
destroying the world through overpopulation, overcon-
sumption, fossil fuels, livestock methane, and so forth.61
Very few will view this destruction as the necessary or
happy ending to an ontology of racism.
To fill in the argumentative case against hope, let us
look back to the ancient Mediterranean world – in which,
incidentally, the belief in periodic world-conflagration
was not uncommon. Ekpyrosis, the Stoics called it, and
they thought of it as a cleansing process, the prelude to
cosmic renewal. Which strikes me as wonderfully, though
impossibly, hopeful.
28
1
The Limits of Hope in the Ancient World

For ancient authors from India to China, Greece to

Rome, hope tends to be a dangerous thing.1 It can set us
up for practical as well as moral failure. Elpis, the Greek
word we translate as hope, is typically an attitude or emo-
tion that is desiderative and goal-oriented, but it can also
denote neutral expectation of evils as well as goods. The
first author to treat elpis as an unqualified good, given
a very specific object of desire (eternal life in Christ),
is St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament.
Before him, good hopes – including eschatological hopes
expressed in other ancient mystery religions – had to be
designated as such (agathē elpis, euelpis, hēdious elpides) to
be distinguished from bad hopes, which preponderate
in Greek literature.2 I turn in my next chapter to other-
worldly or eschatological hopes, mainly Christian ones;
in this chapter, while not drawing too fine a line between
the natural and supernatural in ancient thought, I focus
on worldly hopes. The classical case against hope has five
main points: it is deceptive, blurring our perception of sit-
uations and likely outcomes. It compromises our rational
agency. It subjects us to its linked opposite, fear. It blinds
us to the enjoyment of the present. And most things for
which people hope for lack real worth.
What values rise when hope declines? On one hand,
hard work, fulfillment of duties, and proper planning
based on foresight: I begin this chapter with consideration
29
of these values in Hesiod’s Works and Days. On the other

hand, the awareness of human limits makes humility a
key virtue. Overconfidence, unreasonable expectations
about what the individual or group can accomplish, link
hope to hubris, an ever-present vice of Greek literature.
Impudent hope – elpis lacking promatheias (foresight) and
aidōs (the emotion that limits our self-assertion with
regard to others) – is a form of madness (Pindar, Nemean
11, lines 45–48).3 But the ancients also recognize good
hope, foremost in the competitive strife that defines pub-
lic life: farm-and-trade productivity, war, athletic games,
political activity. Hope could be seen as (and may well
be) a necessary motive, linked to confidence and courage.
The ancient world knew also hope in a future ruler,
a hope more soteriological than political. This ruler
would usher in a new age of justice and peace within and
between nations. Such hope flourished in Jerusalem, most
famously with the eighth-century bce prophet Isaiah, and
then in Rome, from its fifth-century bce temple to Spes
(personified Hope) through to the hopes invested, at least
rhetorically, in Octavian, later Augustus Caesar. The
Roman “spes race,” as one scholar punning calls it,4 abides
as long as the Western empire does, and may appear more
or less continuous with the emphatic hope of Christianity.
Whatever hopes might be expressed for the city-state or
empire, the philosophical schools of antiquity developed
the case against personal hope and passionate agitation. In
the West, Pyrrho’s skepticism is the first systematic effort
to arrive at freedom from passion or suffering (apatheia)
and, positively, undisturbedness (ataraxia). Pyrrho may
have been influenced in this aim, as well as in his means
of suspended judgment (epochē), by the early Buddhism
30
Hesiod and Aeschylus: Prometheus, Pandora, and Hope
he encountered in India. In Athens, the Epicureans,

although hedonists of a sort, aimed as well at ataraxia, in
their case through an understanding of the universe as
atoms and void. For the Stoics, the passions – including
fear, distress, and most forms of hope – constitute false
judgments about what kinds of things truly matter. The
influence of Stoic philosophy is pronounced in Latin lit-
erature as a whole: spes and metus (fear) are commonly
paired as complements as well as opposites.5 Seneca exem-
plifies the pairing: “cease to hope … and you will cease to
fear.” Nonetheless, Seneca retained hope in patria or the
fatherland, and the affective bonds that maintained it.
Hesiod and Aeschylus: Prometheus, Pandora, and

the Work of Hope
Where does hope come from? At what point did we
become, by nature, hoping creatures? Greek myth pro-
vides two distinct answers. Either hope is a morally
ambiguous remnant from Pandora’s jar, or it is a gift
given by Prometheus. Key texts are Hesiod’s late eighth-
century bce poem, Works and Days (Erga kai Hēmerai),
and Aeschylus’s fifth-century bce tragedy, Prometheus
Bound. In Aeschylus’ work, blind hopes are given to
mankind directly by Prometheus, his first and only
unproblematic gift – his second, fire, is viewed askance
by the tragedy’s chorus. In Hesiod, elpis arrives not with
Prometheus but with Zeus’s reprisal against Prometheus’
impious gift of fire: that is, the divinely sent Pandora.
The moral status of elpis is an interpretive crux of
Hesiod’s poem. All we know for sure is that hope has
something to do with Pandora, and something to do with
31
a container. Pandora’s jar (not, as it was sometimes called,

a box) is properly a pithos (line 94),6 a large vessel. It does
not clearly belong to her or arrive with her when the gods
send her among men. All Hesiod tells us is that there is a
pithos that Pandora opens and that it contains something,
and that when Pandora scatters some things (which may
be the contents of the jar), ills beset mankind.7 These
ills, including disease, may be what Pandora scatters, or
they may arise from Pandora’s dismissal of goods, such as
health. Hope alone remains in the pithos, by Zeus’s will.
The central questions are:
1. Is hope an evil among evil things, or a good among

good things?
2. In either case, what does it mean that hope alone, by
Zeus’s will, is caught or trapped inside the jar? Does it
mean that it’s made inaccessible to us – think ahead to
Kafka, “there is hope, but not for us” – or rather that
it’s preserved for us? Is Zeus here punishing humans, or
showing them mercy?
My sense is that Hesiod treats hope as a potential

good, akin to striving, that is preserved for us in the jar
by Zeus’s mercy. Yet Hesiod also treats hope, later in his
poem, as an evil: the empty dreams connected to hubris
and improvidence. In seeing hope as the one good that
Pandora doesn’t lose for us, I concur with E. F. Beall,
who argues that what escapes from the jar are all good
things except for elpis. When the other goods (such as
health and leisure) vanish in the wind, or escape to Mt.
Olympus, the evil of their loss besets us. Beall’s further
argument is that hope as a good, the last good not dis-
persed, is consistent with the poet Theognis’ hymn to
32
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Dublin.
Rule XII. Words in Pairs.—Words in pairs should have a comma

between each pair.
examples.
“In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the
frown and sneer of Harold were discernible in an instant.”—
Macaulay.
“Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”—
Webster.
Rule XIII. Unconnected Words.—When two words, of the same

part of speech, are not connected by a conjunction, a comma should
be placed between them.
examples.
“He had in himself a radiant, living spring of generous and manly
action.”—Burke.
“A still, small voice.”—Kings.
“Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”—Burns.
remarks.
1. When two nouns, the subjects of a verb, are not connected by a conjunction,
a comma should be placed between the two words and also after the second; as,
“Indignation, expostulation, were powerless upon him as a mist upon a rock.”—
Macdonald.
2. When two adjectives come together, the first qualifying the second adjective
and also the noun, a comma should not be used; as, A beautiful white horse.
3. A word repeated for emphasis usually has a punctuation mark before and
after it; as,—
“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”—Coleridge.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall
he do also.”—John xiv. 12.
Rule XIV. A Series of Words.—1. When a series of words, of the

same part of speech, are connected by and, or, nor, they should not
be separated from each other by punctuation marks.
“The fruits and flowers and shrubs sent forth grateful perfumes.”—
Irving.
Some writers place a comma before each and. This, however, is
not necessary.
2. When a conjunction is used only with the last word in the series,
a comma should be placed before the conjunction and between the
other words.
The fruits, flowers, and shrubs sent forth grateful perfumes.
3. When the conjunctions are omitted, a comma should be placed
between each word and also at the end of the series.
The fruits, flowers, shrubs, sent forth grateful perfumes.
remarks.
1. When the last word in the series precedes only a single word, the comma
should be omitted; as, “A refined, thoughtful, warm-hearted, pure-souled
Englishman.”
2. When two words or expressions are connected by or, the latter explaining the
former, the explanatory word or expression should be separated from the rest of
the sentence by a comma or commas; as, “The love of variety, or curiosity of
seeing new things, which is the same, or at least a sister passion to it, seems
woven into the frame of every son and daughter of Adam.”—Sterne.
Rule XV. Phrases and Clauses.—Phrases and clauses, either

with or without conjunctions, having a mutual relation to some other
word in the sentence, should be separated from each other and from
what follows by commas.
examples.
“Purity of style, and an easy flow of numbers, are common to all
Addison’s Latin poems.”—Macaulay.
“The unbought grace of life, the chief defense of nations, the nurse
of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone.”—Burke.
“The little that is known, and the circumstance that little is known,
must be considered as honorable to him.”—Macaulay.
“Books that you can carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand,
are the most useful after all.”—Dr. Johnson.
remarks.
1. A phrase is one of the smaller divisions of a sentence, and consists of two or
more words. Apart from the rest of the sentence, it is incomplete in meaning. It
does not, like a clause, include a subject and a verb.
2. When two brief expressions are connected by a conjunction, it is better to
omit punctuation marks; as, “Good company and good discourse are the very
sinews of virtue.”—Izaak Walton.
3. When words and phrases form a series, a conjunction being used only with
the last phrase, they should be separated from each other and from what follows
by commas; as, “Virtue, merit, and everything that is praiseworthy, will be made
the subject of ridicule and buffoonery.”—Addison.
Rule XVI. Logical Subject.—When the logical subject ends with a

verb, or is separated into parts by commas, or is unusually long, a
comma should be placed between the logical subject and the main
verb.
examples.
“This imaginary promise of divine aid thus mysteriously given,
appeared to him at present in still greater progress of fulfillment.”—
Irving.
“The voice of praise, too, coming from those to whom we had
thought ourselves unknown, has a magic about it that must be felt to
be understood.”—Charles Lever.
“Those who can put the best countenance upon the outrages of
this nature which are offered them, are not without their secret
anguish.”—Addison.
remarks.
1. The logical subject consists of the name of the person or thing, of which
something is affirmed, together with its modifying words. It is “the subject
according to the real meaning or logic of the sentence.”
2. Some writers always place a comma before the verb, when its subject
consists of many words.
Rule XVII. Contrasted Expressions.—Contrasted expressions or

comparisons should be separated by a comma.
examples.
“Of the other two men, one was a species of giant, the other a sort
of dwarf.”—Hugo.
“The more I reflected upon it, the more important it appeared.”—
Goldsmith.
“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God.”—Psalms.
“Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not
live to read.”—Bulwer.
remarks.
1. When the comparison is short and the words closely connected, the comma
may be omitted.
2. When so—that, so—as, rather—than, more—than, connect expressions, the
comma is usually omitted; as, “Ingratitude never so thoroughly pierces the human
heart as when it proceeds from those in whose behalf we have been guilty of
transgression.”—Fielding.
When, however, the expressions themselves are divided into smaller parts by
commas, or are unusually long, they should be separated by a comma; as,—
“So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was God or Devil.”—Dryden.
3. When two short expressions are united by as or than, a comma should not be
used; as,—
“He knew what’s what, and that’s as high

As metaphysic wit can fly.”—Butler.
When, however, the expressions are long, it is better to use a comma; as, “I
have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing
a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it.”—Dr. Johnson.
4. When the first expression is negative and the other affirmative, a comma
should be placed between the expressions and before the negative word, if it does
not commence a sentence; as, “The world generally gives its admiration, not to the
man who does what nobody else even attempts to do, but to the man who does
best what multitudes do well.”—Macaulay.
If, however, a finite verb immediately precedes the negative word, the comma
should be omitted; as, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every
time we fall.”—Confucius.
Rule XVIII. Numeral Figures.—Arabic numbers should be

separated into periods of three figures each, commencing at the
right.
example.
2,509,909,456.
remark.
Dates should not be separated into periods; as, 1877.
Rule XIX. Expressions at the End of Sentences.—It is frequently

necessary, at the end of a sentence, to separate an expression
beginning with a preposition from the rest of the sentence, in order to
avoid ambiguity.
examples.
“He trudged along, unknowing what he sought,

And whistled as he went, for want of thought.”—Dryden.
“Angling is always to be considered as a stick and a string, with a

fly at one end and a fool at the other.”—Swift.
GENERAL REMARK.
A comma should always be used, when it aids in bringing out the

meaning of the writer, or in avoiding ambiguity.
THE SEMICOLON.
Rule I. Long Sentences.—When the smaller divisions of

sentences are separated by commas, the main divisions should be
separated by semicolons.
examples.
“Sheridan, Pitt, and Fox all drank hard and worked hard; they were
all great in the councils of the nation, but not one could rule his own
household.”—London Athenæum.
“Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;

Was every thing by starts, and nothing long.”—Dryden.
“Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that

men’s virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an
action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a
person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most
important battles.”—Plutarch.
Rule II. Expressions Complete in Themselves.—Short

expressions, complete in themselves but slightly connected in
meaning, may be separated by semicolons.
examples.
“We do not want precepts so much as patterns; an example is the
softest and least invidious way of commanding.”—Pliny.
“It is a beautiful thing to model a statue and give it life; to mould an
intelligence and instil truth therein is still more beautiful.”—Hugo.
“There are on every subject a few leading and fixed ideas; their
tracks may be traced by your own genius as well as by reading.”—
Sheridan.
remark.
When as introduces an example, a semicolon should be placed before and a
comma after it.
Rule III. Series of Expressions.—When several clauses follow

each other in succession, having a common dependence on some
part of the sentence, they should be separated from each other by
semicolons, and from the clause on which they depend, by a
comma.
example.
“If such men will make a firm and solemn pause, and meditate
dispassionately on its importance; if they will contemplate it in all its
attributes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate
to part with trivial objections to a constitution, the rejection of which
would, in all probability, put a final period to the Union.”—Hamilton.
remark.
Commas may be used instead of semicolons, when the clauses are short; as,
“When public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when great
interests are at stake, and strong passions excited, nothing is valuable in speech
farther than it is connected with high intellectual and moral endowments.”—
Webster.
GENERAL REMARK.
When the members of a sentence seem to be loosely connected,

they are frequently separated by semicolons.
examples.
“Honest name is goodly; but he that hunteth only for that, is like
him that hath rather seem warm than be warm.”—Sir Thomas Wyatt.
“Some blemishes may undoubtedly be detected in his character;
but the more carefully it is examined, the more will it appear sound in
the noble parts.”—Macaulay.
Some writers use commas in the examples given above in
preference to semicolons, and usage varies so much among our
best writers that it is impossible to lay down a general rule that will
be applicable in all cases. If it is desirable to indicate a somewhat
close connection between the members of a sentence, a comma
should be used; if the connection is slight, it is better to use a
semicolon.
THE COLON.
Rule I. Long Sentences.—When the smaller divisions of

sentences are separated by semicolons, the main divisions should
be separated by a colon.
examples.
“Emulation is a dangerous passion to encourage, in some points,
in young men; it is so linked with envy: if you reproach your son for
not surpassing his school-fellows, he will hate those who are before
him.”—Sheridan.
“A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors:
he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of
sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can
come near the camp.”—O. W. Holmes.
Rule II. A Quotation.—A colon should precede a long quotation. If,
however, the quotation is short, it is better to use a comma.
examples.
Socrates recommended to one of his disciples the following
prayer: “O Jupiter, give us those things which are good for us,
whether they are such things as we pray for, or such things as we do
not pray for; and remove from us those things which are hurtful,
though they are such things as we pray for.”
When the Earl of Dudley took leave of Sydney Smith, on going
from London to Yorkshire, he said: “You have been laughing at me
constantly, Sydney, for the last seven years, and yet, in all that time,
you never said a single thing to me that I wished unsaid.”
remark.
1. When the quotation is long, or it begins a new paragraph, a dash is frequently
placed after the colon.
2. When a direct quotation is introduced into the middle of a sentence, a comma
should be used; as, “He was surprised, but replied, ‘I am not the king, he is there,’
pointing at the same time to a different part of the hall.”—Lingard.
Rule III. Enumeration of Particulars.—A colon should precede an

enumeration of particulars, when they are formally introduced by
thus, following, as follows, this, these, &c.
examples.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights:
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”—
Jefferson.
“The penalty is graduated thus: the mildest, confiscation; the
moderate, closing the shop; the severest, exposure.”—Lippincott’s
Magazine.
remarks.
1. When the particulars are preceded by a colon, they are usually separated
from each other by semicolons, as in the examples given above.
2. If the particulars are not introduced by thus, following, &c., they should be
preceded by a semicolon; as, “Grammar is divided into four parts; Orthography,
Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.”
3. When the particulars are preceded by a semicolon, they are usually
separated from each other by commas.
4. Sometimes a comma and dash are used instead of a semicolon; as,
“Grammar is divided into four parts,—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and
Prosody.”
GENERAL REMARK.
The colon is used by some writers to separate short expressions

that are complete in themselves, but slightly connected in meaning.
examples.
“But men are men: the best sometimes forget.”—Shakespeare.
“It [the Seine] is the wash-tub and summer bath-tub of its citizens;
it was the birthplace of Paris, and it is too often the grave of her
children.”—Lippincott’s Magazine.
If a conjunction is used, it is better to use a semicolon; as,—
“She cannot separate her name from his without lessening it; for it
is equally incrusted with his greatness as with his faults.”—
Lamartine.
She cannot separate her name from his without lessening it: it is
equally incrusted with his greatness as with his faults.
The colon is not as commonly used as formerly. A semicolon
would be preferred by very many writers in all sentences similar to
the examples given above. See Rule II. p. 23.
THE PERIOD.
Rule I. Complete Sentences.—A period should be placed at the
end of a sentence, when it is complete in meaning and construction,
and is declarative or imperative in its nature.
examples.
“Swift boasted that he was never known to steal a hint.”—
Macaulay.
“But evil is wrought by want of thought,

As well as want of heart.”—Hood.
“It is a great evil not to be able to bear an evil.”—Bion.
remark.
A period should always be placed after the title of an essay, oration, after a
signature, an address of a person, &c.
Rule II. Abbreviations.—A period should be used after every

abbreviation.
examples.
Dr. Samuel A. Jones. Mr. C. R. Miller. Mrs. T. S. Applegate. Miss
Hattie E. Knapp.
Esq., Esquire.
Jan., January.
Mich., Michigan.
Hon., Honorable.
Pro tem., for the time being.
Ans., Answer.
D. D., Doctor of Divinity.
B. C., before Christ.
Rev., Reverend.
P., page; pp., pages.
Pres., President.
Rec. Sec., Recording Secretary.
N. Y., New York.
A. D., in the year of our Lord.
A. M., Master of Arts.
M. C., Member of Congress.
No., in number, number.
Co., County.
&c. or etc., and so forth.
remarks.
1. It should be remembered that the period thus used, simply indicates an
abbreviation, and that punctuation marks are to be used, in addition to the period,
when required. When a word, written in full, requires a punctuation mark after it,
the same punctuation mark should be used after the word, when it is abbreviated;
as, Adrian, Michigan, January 5, 1877; Adrian, Mich., Jan. 5, 1877.
2. Some proper names are not abbreviations, and consequently a period should
not be used; as, Ben Jonson, Fred Knapp. When Ben. stands for Benjamin, and
Fred. for Frederick, a period should be used.
3. When numerals are represented by the letters of the alphabet, periods are
placed after them; as, Gen. vii. 1, 7, 8.
4. In numbering pages, no mark should be placed after 1, 2, 3, 4, &c.
5. When a letter, used as an abbreviation, is doubled to indicate the plural, the
period should be placed after the last letter; as, pp. for pages, LL. D. for Doctor of
Laws.
6. In abbreviating words, sometimes the first letters are used, sometimes the
first and last, and sometimes the first and some letter near the middle of the word;
as, Ala. for Alabama, Chas. for Charles, Wm. for William, MS. for manuscript.
7. A list of abbreviations will be found at the close of any good dictionary.
INTERROGATION POINT.
Rule I. Direct Question.—A direct question must be followed by

an interrogation point.
examples.
“Who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open
encounter?”—Milton.
“Are you good men and true?”—Shakespeare.
EXCLAMATION POINT.
Rule I. Strong Emotion.—The exclamation point is used after

expressions denoting strong emotion.
examples.
“Discipline of mind! say rather starvation, confinement, torture,
annihilation.”—Macaulay.
“My valor is certainly going! it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out,
as it were, at the palms of my hands.”—Sheridan.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!”—Shakespeare.
remark.
To express an unusual degree of emotion, more than one exclamation point may
be used.
Rule II. Interjections.—All interjections except O may be followed

by an exclamation point.
examples.
“But, alas! to make me

The fixed figure of the time, for scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at.”—Shakespeare.
“Oh! blessed temper, whose unclouded ray

Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day.”—Pope.
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known
by, let us call thee devil!”—Shakespeare.
remarks.
1. When the connection between the interjection and what follows is very close,
it is sometimes better to put the exclamation point at the end of the sentence; as,
—
“Oh for that ancient spirit

Which curbed the Senate’s will!”—Macaulay.
2. When it is desirable to express strong feeling through-out an entire sentence,

the exclamation point should be placed at the end; as,—
“Ho, trumpets, sound a war-note!

Ho, lictors, clear the way!”—Macaulay.
Rule III. Address.—Expressions of address, when emphatic, may

be followed by an exclamation point.
examples.
“Lord! what music hast thou provided for the saints in heaven,
when thou affordest bad men such music [music of the nightingale]
on earth.”—Izaak Walton.
“Hail, candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the
kindest luminary of the three.”—Lamb.
“Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.”—Goldsmith.
“Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy.”—Byron.
THE DASH.
Rule I. Broken Sentences.—When a sentence is broken off

abruptly, or there is an unexpected change in the sentiment, or
hesitation is to be indicated, a dash should be used.
examples.
Prince.—“I tell you what, my cousin Buckingham,—”
Buck.—“What, my gracious lord?”—Shakespeare.
“I only feel—Farewell—Farewell!”—Byron.
“You will think me foolish;—but—but—may it not be that some

invisible angel has been attracted by the simplicity and good faith
with which our children set about their undertaking? May he not have
spent an hour of his immortality in playing with those dear little
souls?”—Hawthorne.
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it;
anything but—live for it.”—Colton.
Rule II. Concluding Clause.—When several expressions follow

each other in succession, having a common dependence on the
concluding part of the sentence, a dash is frequently placed before
the clause on which they depend.
examples.
“If you think it a crime in this writer that his language has not been
braided and festooned as elegantly as it might be; that he has not
pinched the miserable plaits of his phraseology, nor placed his
patches and feathers with that correctness of millinery which became
him,—then find a civil and obliging verdict against the printer!”—
Curran.
“To foster industry, to promote union, to cherish religious peace,—
these were the honest purposes of Lord Baltimore during his long
supremacy.”—Bancroft.
remarks.
1. A dash is sometimes used to give prominence or emphasis to an emphatic
conclusion; as, “Fortune, friends, kindred, home,—all were gone.”—Prescott.
2. When such words as namely, that is, &c., are omitted, a dash is sometimes
used; as, “Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,—one pure, and the
other impure.”—Hare.
3. When a word or an expression is repeated for emphasis, a dash should be
placed before it; as, “It is this, I conjure Your Lordships, for your honor, for the
honor of the nation, for the honor of human nature, now intrusted to your care,—it
is this duty that the Commons of England, speaking through us, claims at your
hands.”—Sheridan.
Rule III. Subjects.—When the subject of a general statement, or

the subject of a quotation, is in the same paragraph with the subject-
matter, a dash should separate the subject from what follows.
examples.
The Bible.—“A person who professes to be a critic in the niceties
of the English language ought to have the Bible at his fingers’
ends.”—Macaulay.
Letter-Writing.—“Common interests are necessary to give
permanent stability to epistolary connections. We may love a man
dearly, and yet find no time to write ten lines to him.”—From the
German of Rudolph Lindau.
remarks.
1. A subject is a word or expression about which some statement is made.
2. A dash should be placed between a quotation and the author from whom the
quotation is taken.
3. When a question and an answer are in the same paragraph, a dash is
frequently inserted between the two; as, “Saw you my lord?”—“No, lady.”
4. When as, thus, as follows, &c., introduce an example or a quotation, a dash
should be placed after the comma or colon, if what follows commences a new
paragraph; as,—
“All we possess, and use not on the road,

Adds to the burden we must bear.”—Goethe.
Rule IV. Letters or Figures Omitted.—When letters or figures are
omitted, a dash should be used to indicate the omission.
examples.
“Why, to comfort me, must Alice W⸺n be a goblin?”—Lamb.
Mark xi. 1-10. Gen. v. 3-9.
remark.
3-9 is equivalent to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
GENERAL REMARK.
The dash is frequently used to give prominence or emphasis to an

expression.
examples.
“In the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing,—shepherd
voices.”—Dickens.
“Wealth has its temptations,—so has power.”—Robertson.
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force
of the crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow
through it; the storms may enter, the rains may enter,—but the king
of England cannot enter! all his forces dare not cross the threshold of
the ruined tenement.”—Pitt.
Rule V. Parenthesis.—Two dashes are sometimes used instead

of the usual marks of parenthesis.
examples.
“A yellow claw—the very same that had clawed together so much
wealth—poked itself out of the coach window, and dropt some
copper coins upon the ground.”—Hawthorne.
“Jackson—the omniscient Jackson he was called—was of this
period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarious
knowledge than any man of his time.”—Lamb.
remarks.
1. When the sentence, without the parenthesis, would require a comma where
the dashes are used, each dash should be preceded by a comma; as, “See that
aged couple,—a sad sight, truly,—John Proctor, and his wife Elizabeth.”—
Hawthorne.
2. If the parenthetical expression is a question or expresses emotion, an
interrogation or an exclamation point should be placed before the second dash; as,
“The laurel of the hero—alas for humanity that it should be so!—grows best on the
battle field.”
MARKS OF PARENTHESIS.
Rule I. Parenthesis.—When an expression breaks the connection

between the different parts of a sentence, and might be omitted
without affecting the sense or the construction, it should be inclosed
in parenthetical marks.
examples.
“Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bordering
heaven) most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the
Old Year.”—Lamb.
“The tuneful Nine (so sacred legends tell)

First waked their heavenly lyre these scenes to tell!”—Campbell.
“Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole

pieces in it.”—Lamb.
remarks.
1. When parenthetical marks are used, it is sometimes necessary to use
additional marks.
a. When the sentence, without the parenthesis, requires a punctuation
mark where the parenthetical marks are used, the punctuation mark
should be placed after the last mark of the parenthesis; as,—
“Know then this truth (enough for man to know),

‘Virtue alone is happiness below.’”—Pope.
b. Sometimes the parenthesis requires a punctuation mark before the last

mark of the parenthesis; as, “Spill not the morning (the quintessence
of the day!) in recreations.”—Thomas Fuller.
c. When a punctuation mark immediately precedes the last mark of the
parenthesis, and a punctuation mark is also needed where the
parenthetical marks are used, it should be placed before the first mark
of the parenthesis; as, “F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen. He
had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth, (how odd sounds
Latin from an oilman’s lips!) which my better knowledge since has
enabled me to correct.”—Lamb.
2. An interrogation point inclosed in parenthetical marks (?) implies that an
assertion is doubtful.
3. An exclamation point inclosed within parenthetical marks (!) expresses irony
or contempt.
4. Parenthetical marks are not as frequently used as formerly, the comma and
dash being often preferred.
BRACKETS.
Rule I. Quoted Passage.—When words are inserted by another

into a quoted passage, either to correct a mistake or explain the
meaning, they should be inclosed in brackets.
examples.
“A variety of pleasing objects meet [meets] the eye.”
“‘My dear lady,’ returned the schoolmaster [Mr. Graham], ‘when I
have on good grounds made up my mind to a thing, I always feel as
if I had promised God to do it; and indeed it amounts to the same
thing very nearly. Such a resolve, then, is not to be unmade, except
on equally good grounds with those upon which it was made.’”—
George Macdonald.
remarks.
1. Punctuation marks are sometimes required, when the brackets are used. The
same remarks apply to the brackets that apply to parenthetical marks.
2. In reporting speeches, brackets are used, when words are introduced by the
reporter which do not form a part of the speech; as,—
“We would have our Union to be a union of hearts, and we would have our
Constitution obeyed, not merely because of force that compels obedience, but
obeyed because the people love the principles of the Constitution [long continued
applause], and to-day, if I am called to the work to which Abraham Lincoln was
called sixteen years ago, it is under brighter skies and more favorable auspices.
[Applause.] I do hope, I do fervently believe, that, by the aid of divine Providence,
we may do something in this day of peace, by works of peace, towards re-
establishing, in the hearts of our countrymen, a real, a hearty attachment to the
Constitution as it is, and to the Union as it is. [Long continued applause].”—
President Hayes.—Chicago Tribune.
3. Parenthetical marks are frequently used instead of brackets.
QUOTATION MARKS.
Rule I. Direct Quotation.—When the exact words of another are

given, they should be inclosed in quotation marks.
examples.
“He had the longest tongue and the shortest temper of any man,
high or low, I ever met with.”—Wilkie Collins.
Prescott, in his “Conquest of Mexico,” tells us that intemperance
among the Aztecs “was punished in the young with death, and in
older persons with loss of rank and confiscation of property.”
remarks.
1. When the exact words of another are not given, quotation marks should not
be used; as,—

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Literary Criticism : A Short History - Modern Criticism

Literary Criticism : A Short History - Classical

Literary Criticism: A Short History - Romantic

Literary Criticism : A Short History - Neo-Classical

Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History 1st Edition

Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6

European Literary History An Introduction 1st Edition

A Haven in the Keys Coconut Key 4 1st Edition Hope

Hope for us has a positive connotation. Yet it was criticized in ­classical

a da m pot k ay is the William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Preface  page vii

Introduction: For and Against Hope 1

1 The Limits of Hope in the Ancient World 29

2 Eternal Hope: The Christian Vision 72

3 The Three Hopes of Humanism: Sacred,

Pope’s Spring of Hope 137

4 Something Evermore About to Be: Hope in

5 Later Nineteenth-Century Responses to

6 Modernism: Repetition, Epiphany, Waiting 265

Hope seems to be everywhere. The pop artist Robert

sympathetic to friends who continued to hope for recovery

use of “literature” is inclusive, in keeping with an earlier

I like the touch of “practicing utopia” – something always

of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. Again, it

Let me conclude with part of a poem. No less a pessi-

In Hardy’s wintertime poem of bereavement and empty

Is hope a virtue? Not necessarily. We hope for many

expectation indulged with pleasure” (definition 1). That

to be an icy femme fatale. Magwitch has afforded Pip the

“I’ve done wonderful well. There’s others went out alonger

Pip expresses a hope in the past and then gratification

1. You belong to or have been influenced by one of the

Because hope’s positive connotations are now prevalent

semi-secularized virtue: the hope for more life, a better

what history shows to be impossible. The first of these

The wishes we have, from generation to generation, are

accomplishment, but rather to be able to enjoy the simple

of hope” in order to avoid disappointment and anger.15

spontaneously change their fleeces to purple and saffron

1. Hope is fundamentally deceptive, based on an

susceptible to the negative future-oriented emotion of

Horace enshrines this last point in one of his best-known

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

Heaven may not have further power over what has

than not being God’s justice.22 “Faith inaugurates a duty

nation or Mediterranean world (see, for example, Isaiah

Hope’s religious opposite is despair, often interpreted as

Addison will put it in one of his broadly popular Spectator

who find it, on balance, attractively communal, and those

or desert, in the service of relative equality and social

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy,

Two things for which Wordsworth hoped were the elim-

changes and improvements. The hopes of youth are often

Part of the reason it never stops is that satisfaction is not

Our presumed attraction to the ever-out-of-reach, the

Hope for us has a positive connotation. Yet it was criticized in classical

Preface page vii