Collected Critical Writings

by Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Haynes (Editor)

The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty years of Hill's published criticism, in a revised final form, and also adds much new work. It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic whom A. N. Wilson has called "probably the best writer
alive, in verse or in prose." In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context -
political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established
themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's "The Night", his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary . Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in "Our Word is Our
Bond", "Language, Suffering, and Value", and "Poetry and Value". In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction

832 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet and professor emeritus of English literature and religion.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fifth book among the five collected, numbered here, across individually published books, into chapters -- for Hill no doubt sees this as his biographia literaria -- is called Alienated Majesty, and is a long argument about the relationship of American poetry to the Anglo-American poetry tradition. What's wrong with America's contribution to poetry, in Hill's view, is pragmatism. What's right with it is its spirit of alienated majesty, embodied for Hill in Whitman's work. Even when I violently disagree with Hill, as I do, for example, when he calls out William James for his condescending view towards his subjects in Varieties, he is brilliant, and his claim for an Anglo-American tradition in poetry, in the project called "Alienated Majesty" (a phrase he likes from Emerson), highly or even churlishly arguable, has made me want to get back to writing criticism. So: generative.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much to dislike about the poet Geoffrey Hill's critical writing including his stern judgments, obscurantism, difficult sentences that studiously avoid plain speech, his sometimes over indulgence when consulting the OED (how many people look up the word "or"?) But to follow his mind and the record of his vast reading into primary and background texts and memory and associations is worth time and respect. He goes for the fit audience though few.

[Diann Blakely]

This volume should be read along with A TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER, which I have reviewed here at greater length.