Editing Enoch Powell (section)

== Academic career ==
After graduating from Cambridge, Powell stayed on at Trinity College as a fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh.{{sfn|Roth|1970|pp=18–20}}<ref>{{Citation | contribution = Enoch Powell | volume = 3 | title = The Dictionary of British Classicists | year = 2004}}</ref> He won the Craven travelling scholarship, which he used to fund travels to Italy, where he researched Greek manuscripts. He also learned Italian.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=21}}{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=27}} Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after [[Adolf Hitler]] came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war".{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=22}} He suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the [[Night of the Long Knives]] in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture.<ref group="nb">Powell recalled that he sat for hours in a state of shock: "So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all a self-created myth ... The spiritual homeland had not been a spiritual homeland after all, since nothing can be a homeland, let alone a spiritual homeland, where there is no justice, where justice does not reign".</ref>{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=24}}{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=28}}

Powell spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=25}} Since 1932, Powell had been working on the Egyptian manuscripts of [[J. Rendel Harris]] and his translation from Greek into English was published in 1937.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=20}}{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=31}}

Powell's collection, ''First Poems'' (1937) and was influenced by Housman.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=30}}{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=23}}<ref group="nb">''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]'' noted they possessed to a degree "the tone and temper" of Housman's ''[[A Shropshire Lad]]''. The [[Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom|Poet Laureate]] [[John Masefield]] told Powell he read them "with a great deal of admiration for their concision and point", and [[Hilaire Belloc]] said "I have read them with the greatest pleasure and interest ... I shall always retain them".</ref>{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=33}} His second volume of poems, ''Casting Off, and Other Poems'', was printed in 1939.<ref group="nb">In its review, ''The Times Literary Supplement'' said Powell's "lyrical feeling, reflection, and an epigrammatic conciseness are pleasantly balanced, and he is particularly happy perhaps in saluting the blossoms of spring".</ref>{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=24}}<ref group="nb">[[Maurice Cowling]] appraised Powell's poems as "restrained and pessimistic, and written out of a high sense of human destiny. It expressed the position of youth and had an eschatological overtone characteristic of Housman's repressed tombstone emotion. It registered the resigned, masculine gloom of the Trinity ethos into which he had been inducted".</ref><ref>Maurice Cowling, ''Religion and Public Doctrine in England'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 432–433.</ref> A further collection of poems, ''Dancer's End'' and ''The Wedding Gift'', were published in 1951. A full collection of poems were published in one volume in 1990.<ref group="nb">Powell said the first two volumes were "dominated by the War – the War foreseen, the War imminent, and the War actual", and the second group were a "response to a brief period...of intense emotional excitement".</ref><ref>Enoch Powell, 'Foreword', ''Collected Poems'' (London: Bellew Publishing, 1990), p. vii.</ref>

In 1937, he was appointed Professor of Greek at the [[University of Sydney]], aged 25, (failing in his aim of beating Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). He was the youngest professor in the [[British Empire]].{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=35}}<ref>[[Shane Maloney]] and Chris Grosz, [https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/april/1333497085/shane-maloney/gough-whitlam-enoch-powell#mtr200 "Gough Whitlam & Enoch Powell"], ''[[The Monthly]]'', April 2012. Retrieved 29 June 2023.</ref> He revised [[Henry Stuart Jones]]'s edition of [[Thucydides]]' ''[[History of the Peloponnesian War|Historiae]]'' for the [[Oxford University Press]] in 1938. His most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his ''Lexicon to Herodotus'', published by [[Cambridge University Press]] the same year, which was well received by critics.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=42}}

Soon after his arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the [[Nicholson Museum]] at the University of Sydney. He informed the vice-chancellor that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army.{{sfn|Roth|1970|p=29}}{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=37}} In his inaugural lecture as professor of Greek in May 1938, he condemned Britain's policy of appeasement.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=45}}{{sfn|Shepherd|1997|p=33}}<ref>Enoch Powell, ''Greek in the University: An Inaugural Lecture'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p9.</ref><ref group="nb">After [[Neville Chamberlain]]'s first visit to [[Adolf Hitler]] at [[Berchtesgaden]], Powell wrote in a letter to his parents on 18 September 1938: "I do here, in the most solemn and bitter manner, curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy to which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable.</ref>{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=47}}<ref group="nb">In another letter to his parents in June 1939, before the beginning of war, Powell wrote: "It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and [[Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax|Halifax]] and all the other smarmy traitors".</ref>{{sfn|Heffer|1998|p=53}} At the outbreak of war, Powell immediately returned to the UK.{{Sfn|Heffer|1998|p=55}}