Geoffrey Hill
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199657001
- eISBN:
- 9780191742194
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657001.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter probes Hill's sense that a poet's fulfilment of his role is connected with the ability to engage appropriately with listeners: the right forms of address to the right addressees. It ...
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This chapter probes Hill's sense that a poet's fulfilment of his role is connected with the ability to engage appropriately with listeners: the right forms of address to the right addressees. It argues address demands breaking and preserving customary good behaviours, accusatory and commendatory responses, focusing on Hill's argumentative addresses in lectures and essays. It explores the predominantly haranguing address: interlocutions directed at others. Julien Benda, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, William Empson, and Stephan Collini are put into play alongside Hill's addresses. Each of these writers articulates misgivings about authorial inspiration. Each focuses on the writer's susceptibility, the danger of succumbing to misplaced pride when exposed to the ‘crowd’. In Hill's public addresses, ‘real denunciation’ is hard labour, a verbal warfare turned as much upon oneself as upon others. The poet-critic witnesses his own susceptibilities and betrayals in ‘the public institution’ of language.Less
This chapter probes Hill's sense that a poet's fulfilment of his role is connected with the ability to engage appropriately with listeners: the right forms of address to the right addressees. It argues address demands breaking and preserving customary good behaviours, accusatory and commendatory responses, focusing on Hill's argumentative addresses in lectures and essays. It explores the predominantly haranguing address: interlocutions directed at others. Julien Benda, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, William Empson, and Stephan Collini are put into play alongside Hill's addresses. Each of these writers articulates misgivings about authorial inspiration. Each focuses on the writer's susceptibility, the danger of succumbing to misplaced pride when exposed to the ‘crowd’. In Hill's public addresses, ‘real denunciation’ is hard labour, a verbal warfare turned as much upon oneself as upon others. The poet-critic witnesses his own susceptibilities and betrayals in ‘the public institution’ of language.
Peter McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a ...
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Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.Less
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once ...
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Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once character and enactment…itself both absolute wilt and contingency’. ‘Will’ is a matter central to the writing of poetry, though it is arguably something less accessible for poetry criticism. The poetry's sense of timing is a matter of importance, and more than just a way of speaking about particular patterns of syntax and metre. This chapter also examines Hill's poem The Triumph of Love and the questions it raises about language and difficulty, as well as rhythm and timing in his other work Speech! Speech!.Less
Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once character and enactment…itself both absolute wilt and contingency’. ‘Will’ is a matter central to the writing of poetry, though it is arguably something less accessible for poetry criticism. The poetry's sense of timing is a matter of importance, and more than just a way of speaking about particular patterns of syntax and metre. This chapter also examines Hill's poem The Triumph of Love and the questions it raises about language and difficulty, as well as rhythm and timing in his other work Speech! Speech!.
Tim Kendall
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199562022
- eISBN:
- 9780191707636
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562022.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the war poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Hill's is a poetry of witness which, in all but a manner of speaking, ‘wasn't there’. That crucial fact of absence is never disguised. He ...
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This chapter explores the war poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Hill's is a poetry of witness which, in all but a manner of speaking, ‘wasn't there’. That crucial fact of absence is never disguised. He observes earlier in The Triumph of Love, ‘If witness meant witness, all could be martyrs’: his awareness of etymological kinship discovers in the past a point of convergence for his correlated explorations of the poetry of war and the psychology of religious martyrdom. That witness no longer means witness (except in a manner of speaking often voiced by Hill) is a circumstance that he might be expected to deplore, having stated in 1981 that ‘The history of the creation and the debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and original justice’. Some of Hill's admirers have been too credulous of the linguistic and religious claims made by such a self-consciously post-lapsarian vision, having never thought to enquire when and where this ‘kingdom of innocence and original justice’ existed. Whether the meaning of words is debased or evolves over time is a debate which never touches the poet's confidence that ‘sematology is a theological dimension’.Less
This chapter explores the war poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Hill's is a poetry of witness which, in all but a manner of speaking, ‘wasn't there’. That crucial fact of absence is never disguised. He observes earlier in The Triumph of Love, ‘If witness meant witness, all could be martyrs’: his awareness of etymological kinship discovers in the past a point of convergence for his correlated explorations of the poetry of war and the psychology of religious martyrdom. That witness no longer means witness (except in a manner of speaking often voiced by Hill) is a circumstance that he might be expected to deplore, having stated in 1981 that ‘The history of the creation and the debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and original justice’. Some of Hill's admirers have been too credulous of the linguistic and religious claims made by such a self-consciously post-lapsarian vision, having never thought to enquire when and where this ‘kingdom of innocence and original justice’ existed. Whether the meaning of words is debased or evolves over time is a debate which never touches the poet's confidence that ‘sematology is a theological dimension’.
Geoffrey Hill
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199657001
- eISBN:
- 9780191742194
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657001.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter focuses on Hill's use of address for persuasion and concession. These are nearly always pejorative terms in Hill, allied with weakness, susceptibility to coercion. Attentive to ...
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This chapter focuses on Hill's use of address for persuasion and concession. These are nearly always pejorative terms in Hill, allied with weakness, susceptibility to coercion. Attentive to Wordsworth's ‘Convention of Cintra’ (quoted by Hill in The Triumph of Love) and to Wordsworth's sentiment that poetry must befit its audience and ‘adopt the very language of men’, this chapter questions the extent to which Hill's address similarly pursues a ‘struggle / for a noble vernacular’. To what extent are the speakers’ persuasively ‘humbled’ confessions deemed problematic in such work? This chapter focuses particularly on the essay ‘Our Word is Our Bond’ and on Hill's uneasy textual relationships with Eliot, Pound, and J. L. Austin.Less
This chapter focuses on Hill's use of address for persuasion and concession. These are nearly always pejorative terms in Hill, allied with weakness, susceptibility to coercion. Attentive to Wordsworth's ‘Convention of Cintra’ (quoted by Hill in The Triumph of Love) and to Wordsworth's sentiment that poetry must befit its audience and ‘adopt the very language of men’, this chapter questions the extent to which Hill's address similarly pursues a ‘struggle / for a noble vernacular’. To what extent are the speakers’ persuasively ‘humbled’ confessions deemed problematic in such work? This chapter focuses particularly on the essay ‘Our Word is Our Bond’ and on Hill's uneasy textual relationships with Eliot, Pound, and J. L. Austin.
Geoffrey Hill
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199657001
- eISBN:
- 9780191742194
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657001.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter focuses on Hill's rude addresses, often levelled towards editors and critics (Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem). Such address has been read as unidirectional redress; personal railing that ...
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This chapter focuses on Hill's rude addresses, often levelled towards editors and critics (Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem). Such address has been read as unidirectional redress; personal railing that rejects responses from the yous it upbraids. The chapter explores the different communities of address negotiated by Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power, and considers the figure of the literary ‘rebel’, as he moves in crowds and readerships, addressing commemorated figures and the intelligentsia. Critical of Eliot's ‘common reader’, Hill insists that address is not comfortably middle-brow activity, pressing upon you common ‘difficulty’. Poetry wields ‘pain’ and ‘stark indignation’ as weapons against the secure and elite. The poet's, and the common man's, speech comes from that rich, shared history employed by the Modernists; from artworks, events, and memorials, and from the patterns of working-class speech/life. But are Hill's addresses successfully self-upbraiding in donning the public voice that accosts itself in doing verbal battle with others?Less
This chapter focuses on Hill's rude addresses, often levelled towards editors and critics (Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem). Such address has been read as unidirectional redress; personal railing that rejects responses from the yous it upbraids. The chapter explores the different communities of address negotiated by Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power, and considers the figure of the literary ‘rebel’, as he moves in crowds and readerships, addressing commemorated figures and the intelligentsia. Critical of Eliot's ‘common reader’, Hill insists that address is not comfortably middle-brow activity, pressing upon you common ‘difficulty’. Poetry wields ‘pain’ and ‘stark indignation’ as weapons against the secure and elite. The poet's, and the common man's, speech comes from that rich, shared history employed by the Modernists; from artworks, events, and memorials, and from the patterns of working-class speech/life. But are Hill's addresses successfully self-upbraiding in donning the public voice that accosts itself in doing verbal battle with others?
Sophie Ratcliffe
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199239870
- eISBN:
- 9780191716799
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239870.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, ...
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The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel, Jane Smiley, and Geoffrey Hill. The epilogue concludes by arguing against the implied association between empathy, sympathy, reading and moral virtue.Less
The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel, Jane Smiley, and Geoffrey Hill. The epilogue concludes by arguing against the implied association between empathy, sympathy, reading and moral virtue.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From ...
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This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression, and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring.Less
This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression, and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which ...
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T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which his own opinions had come to carry. The young Eliot went on to be seen as the ancestor of an altogether less dangerous school of literary criticism in the United States and Britain, many of whose members adopted his literary enthusiasms and dislikes, along with a few motifs of interpretation held to be his ideas. Eliot confessed that he can never re-read any of his own prose writings without acute embarrassment. This chapter also examines the poem The Redress of Poetry, in which Seamus Heaney gives more than a glimpse of the charm, grace, and carefully judged gravity with which the poet handled his acts of praise. Geoffrey Hill as a poet-critic and the influence of his critical work on contemporary poetry other than his own are also discussed.Less
T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which his own opinions had come to carry. The young Eliot went on to be seen as the ancestor of an altogether less dangerous school of literary criticism in the United States and Britain, many of whose members adopted his literary enthusiasms and dislikes, along with a few motifs of interpretation held to be his ideas. Eliot confessed that he can never re-read any of his own prose writings without acute embarrassment. This chapter also examines the poem The Redress of Poetry, in which Seamus Heaney gives more than a glimpse of the charm, grace, and carefully judged gravity with which the poet handled his acts of praise. Geoffrey Hill as a poet-critic and the influence of his critical work on contemporary poetry other than his own are also discussed.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Form is the serious heart of a poem where such ‘authority’ as poetry bears must reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run his business in broader senses. ...
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Form is the serious heart of a poem where such ‘authority’ as poetry bears must reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run his business in broader senses. Authority is not something that may be said to come to an end; although its name might not be spoken, or might change, it is always a basic condition of any contemporary literature. But poetry's dealings with authority, in this sense, are seldom straightforward. These arguments are illustrated in this book, which examines 20th-century British and Irish poetry by focusing on the works of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. This introductory chapter also analyses the form and execution of ‘Church Going’, a poem by Philip Larkin.Less
Form is the serious heart of a poem where such ‘authority’ as poetry bears must reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run his business in broader senses. Authority is not something that may be said to come to an end; although its name might not be spoken, or might change, it is always a basic condition of any contemporary literature. But poetry's dealings with authority, in this sense, are seldom straightforward. These arguments are illustrated in this book, which examines 20th-century British and Irish poetry by focusing on the works of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. This introductory chapter also analyses the form and execution of ‘Church Going’, a poem by Philip Larkin.
Jeffrey Wainwright
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719067549
- eISBN:
- 9781781703359
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719067549.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place ...
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Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place in Geoffrey Hill's poetic imagination right from the beginning. In ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, littoral and sunlight work as a metaphor for ‘well dug-in language’ itself. All of Hill's work in the tilth of language knows that metaphor is but one instance of its approximate nature, that it ‘pitches us as it finds’. But his wintry, hedged, clouded, ‘rare pale’ sunlights might sometimes pitch him, and so his readers, beyond labouring.Less
Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place in Geoffrey Hill's poetic imagination right from the beginning. In ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, littoral and sunlight work as a metaphor for ‘well dug-in language’ itself. All of Hill's work in the tilth of language knows that metaphor is but one instance of its approximate nature, that it ‘pitches us as it finds’. But his wintry, hedged, clouded, ‘rare pale’ sunlights might sometimes pitch him, and so his readers, beyond labouring.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311178
- eISBN:
- 9781846314049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314049.006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It argues that the ‘praxis of an individual style’ in his work involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially ...
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This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It argues that the ‘praxis of an individual style’ in his work involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially true of his recent volumes, with their capricious swerves between savage indignation and comic deflation, the eulogistic and the elegiac. It considers Hill's sense of what it means to be ‘eccentric’ to gain insight on the poet's strange behaviour on the page.Less
This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It argues that the ‘praxis of an individual style’ in his work involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially true of his recent volumes, with their capricious swerves between savage indignation and comic deflation, the eulogistic and the elegiac. It considers Hill's sense of what it means to be ‘eccentric’ to gain insight on the poet's strange behaviour on the page.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ...
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This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
Jeffrey Wainwright
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719067549
- eISBN:
- 9781781703359
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719067549.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together ...
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Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together from the uncountable range of possibilities of a number of words that simply present themselves as ‘right’ seems not only a beauty but a mystery beyond the laws of logic or rhetoric. It is in part because Geoffrey Hill's work, in poetry and prose, is in perpetual struggle with ‘plain speaking’ that he is drawn to write so often on seventeenth-century subjects.Less
Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together from the uncountable range of possibilities of a number of words that simply present themselves as ‘right’ seems not only a beauty but a mystery beyond the laws of logic or rhetoric. It is in part because Geoffrey Hill's work, in poetry and prose, is in perpetual struggle with ‘plain speaking’ that he is drawn to write so often on seventeenth-century subjects.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311178
- eISBN:
- 9781846314049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314049.007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter argues that Geoffrey Hill's critical and poetic sensibility was influenced by the opinions of Wordsworth and Coleridge on matters of taste. His critical writings reflect a scrupulous, ...
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This chapter argues that Geoffrey Hill's critical and poetic sensibility was influenced by the opinions of Wordsworth and Coleridge on matters of taste. His critical writings reflect a scrupulous, even suspicious alertness to the ways in which ideas of ‘taste’ inform, and sometimes threaten to degrade, literary evaluation. Hill recognizes that a faculty so often innocently configured as a quality of autonomous, subjective choice may in reality be determined and directed by an oppressive Zeitgeist.Less
This chapter argues that Geoffrey Hill's critical and poetic sensibility was influenced by the opinions of Wordsworth and Coleridge on matters of taste. His critical writings reflect a scrupulous, even suspicious alertness to the ways in which ideas of ‘taste’ inform, and sometimes threaten to degrade, literary evaluation. Hill recognizes that a faculty so often innocently configured as a quality of autonomous, subjective choice may in reality be determined and directed by an oppressive Zeitgeist.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311178
- eISBN:
- 9781846314049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314049.008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It considers Hills awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium — with all its debasements, approximations, and equivocations — and ...
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This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It considers Hills awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium — with all its debasements, approximations, and equivocations — and his efforts to work against it, by subjecting words to formal pressures and shaping impulses so as to intimate an ideal of perfectibility beyond the tormenting encounter with imperfection. This tension may be understood in terms of a so-called ‘conflict of opposites’, as seen in Hill's profession that poetry occupies an intermediate position between the ‘kingdom of incurable anxiety’ of which Charles Péguy once spoke and an inaccessible ‘transcendent kingdom […] wherein truth abides’, as described by Simone Weil.Less
This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It considers Hills awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium — with all its debasements, approximations, and equivocations — and his efforts to work against it, by subjecting words to formal pressures and shaping impulses so as to intimate an ideal of perfectibility beyond the tormenting encounter with imperfection. This tension may be understood in terms of a so-called ‘conflict of opposites’, as seen in Hill's profession that poetry occupies an intermediate position between the ‘kingdom of incurable anxiety’ of which Charles Péguy once spoke and an inaccessible ‘transcendent kingdom […] wherein truth abides’, as described by Simone Weil.
David-Antoine Williams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199583546
- eISBN:
- 9780191595295
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583546.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet‐critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus ...
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This book studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet‐critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Beginning with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas, the book situates these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, though in another sense drastically other, an otherness bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career‐long contemplation of the ideal of poetic ‘integrity’, and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.Less
This book studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet‐critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Beginning with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas, the book situates these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, though in another sense drastically other, an otherness bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career‐long contemplation of the ideal of poetic ‘integrity’, and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.
Matthew Sperling
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198701088
- eISBN:
- 9780191770524
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198701088.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Poetry
Interviewed in 1966, Geoffrey Hill said, ‘Language contains everything you want—history, sociology, economics: it is a kind of drama of human destiny.’ This book shows how the work of one of the ...
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Interviewed in 1966, Geoffrey Hill said, ‘Language contains everything you want—history, sociology, economics: it is a kind of drama of human destiny.’ This book shows how the work of one of the major post-war writers in English has been charged by a mythological sense of language’s historical drama, by reading the whole body of Hill’s poetry from sixty years against a tradition of visionary poet-philologists that he himself has delineated. That line runs from the present-day editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Chenevix Trench in the Victorian era, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, and ultimately back to Saint Augustine’s theory of language. Through detailed close readings of Hill’s work and its scholarly inspirations, and extensive fresh archival research, new light is shed upon poetry’s relation to lexicography, etymology, and theological understandings of language. Key themes include language’s fallenness from prelapsarian origins, its infection and enrichment by original sin and error, the possible recovery of its pristine origins through surrogates such as music, Hebrew, and the language of angels, and its status as an arena of political and historical contestation. The book considers a far wider range of Hill’s writings, in far greater detail, than criticism of his work has done so far, and it is the first to make substantial use of recently available archive materials. It thereby presents one of the fullest and most authoritative accounts of the work of a living writer in recent years.Less
Interviewed in 1966, Geoffrey Hill said, ‘Language contains everything you want—history, sociology, economics: it is a kind of drama of human destiny.’ This book shows how the work of one of the major post-war writers in English has been charged by a mythological sense of language’s historical drama, by reading the whole body of Hill’s poetry from sixty years against a tradition of visionary poet-philologists that he himself has delineated. That line runs from the present-day editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Chenevix Trench in the Victorian era, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, and ultimately back to Saint Augustine’s theory of language. Through detailed close readings of Hill’s work and its scholarly inspirations, and extensive fresh archival research, new light is shed upon poetry’s relation to lexicography, etymology, and theological understandings of language. Key themes include language’s fallenness from prelapsarian origins, its infection and enrichment by original sin and error, the possible recovery of its pristine origins through surrogates such as music, Hebrew, and the language of angels, and its status as an arena of political and historical contestation. The book considers a far wider range of Hill’s writings, in far greater detail, than criticism of his work has done so far, and it is the first to make substantial use of recently available archive materials. It thereby presents one of the fullest and most authoritative accounts of the work of a living writer in recent years.
Jeffrey Wainwright
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719067549
- eISBN:
- 9781781703359
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719067549.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's ...
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Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. The book shows how Hill's words are never lightly ‘acceptable’ but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by—words that are ‘getting it right’. It is a comprehensive critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form.Less
Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. The book shows how Hill's words are never lightly ‘acceptable’ but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by—words that are ‘getting it right’. It is a comprehensive critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form.
Jeffrey Wainwright
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719067549
- eISBN:
- 9781781703359
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719067549.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
‘Beauty’ might be said to be a problem for many twentieth-century artists. In his essay on Ezra Pound's ‘Envoi (1919)’, Geoffrey Hill quotes Pound's assertion ‘Beauty is difficult’, a quotation from ...
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‘Beauty’ might be said to be a problem for many twentieth-century artists. In his essay on Ezra Pound's ‘Envoi (1919)’, Geoffrey Hill quotes Pound's assertion ‘Beauty is difficult’, a quotation from the first of the ‘Pisan Cantos’, LXXIV. This chapter examines the bridge between two sections in Hill's Speech! Speech!, sections 80 and 81. This passage begins with one of those moments when Hill responds to our desire for naturalisation, and for ‘the poetic’: a clear, lyrical evocation of natural beauty. But then he moves into an equally perfectly observed ugliness as the waterscape resolves into the stains of pollution.Less
‘Beauty’ might be said to be a problem for many twentieth-century artists. In his essay on Ezra Pound's ‘Envoi (1919)’, Geoffrey Hill quotes Pound's assertion ‘Beauty is difficult’, a quotation from the first of the ‘Pisan Cantos’, LXXIV. This chapter examines the bridge between two sections in Hill's Speech! Speech!, sections 80 and 81. This passage begins with one of those moments when Hill responds to our desire for naturalisation, and for ‘the poetic’: a clear, lyrical evocation of natural beauty. But then he moves into an equally perfectly observed ugliness as the waterscape resolves into the stains of pollution.
