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Geoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in the English language. The essays gathered in this book present a number of new contexts in which to explore a wide range of his writings, from the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the recent volumes A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) and Collected Critical Writings (2008). Connections are made between the early and the later poetry, and between the poetry and the criticism, and archival materials are considered along with the published texts. The essays also make comparisons across disciplines, discussing Hill's work in relation to theology, philosophy and intellectual history, to literature from other languages, and to the other arts. In doing so, they cast fresh light upon Hill's dense, original and sometimes challenging writings, opening them up in new ways for all readers of his work.
List of contents
Contents: Steven Matthews: Hill's Uncollected Oxford Poems - Piers Pennington: The Manuscripts and Composition of 'Genesis' - Charles Lock: Beside the Point: A Diligence of Accidentals - Kathryn Murphy: Hill's Conversions - Michael Molan: Milton and Eliot in the Work of Geoffrey Hill - Matthew Sperling: Hill and Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought - Marcus Waithe: Hill, Ruskin, and Intrinsic Value - Sheridan Burnside: The 'Tenebrae' Poems of Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill - Matthew Paskins: Hill and Gillian Rose - Hugh Haughton: 'Music's Invocation': Music and History in Geoffrey Hill - Kenneth Haynes: 'Perplexed Persistence': The Criticism of Geoffrey Hill - Geoffrey Hill: from Odi Barbare, XXI-XXII.
About the author
Piers Pennington is completing a doctoral thesis on modern poetry at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Matthew Sperling is Fellow by Special Election in Modern English Literature at Keble College, Oxford. He is at work on a monograph on Geoffrey Hill, etymological thinking and the history of linguistic thought, and has published essays on the work of Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne.
