DOCSLIB.ORG

Historiography in Modern Poetry

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Historiography in Modern Poetry REGISTRATION NO. 3604276 Historiography in Modern Poetry: Text, Imagination and Authority in the work of David Jones, Geoffrey Hill and Ian Duhig And King Harold A long poem in three parts Author: Meirion Owen Jordan 8/1/2012 Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there-from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Author Name: Meirion Owen Jordan Year of Submission: 2012 Thesis Title: Historiography in Modern Poetry: Text, Imagination and Authority in the work of David Jones, Geoffrey Hill & Ian Duhig ABSTRACT This thesis explores how modern poetry is shaped by its relationships with academic and historical texts. Occasioned by creative writers’ increasing involvement in the academy, it considers the consequences of this relationship for contemporary poetry praxis. Through close readings of David Jones’ Anathemata, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and Ian Duhig’s The Speed of Dark, it explores how imaginative conceptions of poems relate to and are affected by their material presentations as texts. In so doing, there is a particular focus on how paratexts translate academic models of authoritative writing into their poems. This thesis addresses a number of key questions: how do modern poets express ideas about the past? How do their borrowings from academic and scholarly texts shape this expression? Do readers’ past experiences have an impact? Taking the work of critics Jerome J. McGann and Linda Hutcheon as its starting point, it develops new approaches to these questions through a synthesis of their ideas and applying these issues to the particulars of poetry composition. It opens new avenues of relevance to modern poets, connecting contemporary poetry criticism with textual studies. The creative component of this thesis makes a parallel treatment of these critical issues in King Harold, a long poem on the multiple literary lives of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king. My poem dramatises the tensions explored in the critical component, creating an exciting and original bricolage of academic and historical paratexts. Both the critical component and the creative writing element of this thesis illustrate the impact of academic textual production on modern poetry. 3 Contents Critical Component: Introduction 4 Chapter 1 – Intertext: the Speed of Dark and BnFr. 146 12 Chapter 2 – Paratext: Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Waltham Traditions 39 Chapter 3 – David Jones’ Anathemata, the Mabinogi and the Anamnesis of Identity 69 Chapter 4 – Conclusion 99 Appendix A1 121 Appendix A2 135 Appendix A3 141 Appendix B1 147 Appendix C1 151 Appendix C2 164 Bibliography 165 Creative Component: Prefatory note on the layout of the poem 175 King Harold (title page) 176 Prologue 177 Harold’s Chronicle 178 Harold’s History 207 Harold’s Tapestry 239 4 Introduction 0.0 Outline What versions of the past do poets attempt to convey in their poems? How do modern poets write about the past? What impact do readers have on such versions? Moreover, what does the process of transmission from poet to reader introduce into these versions of the past? Poets’ ideas of the past are naturally shaped and delineated by the conventions of historical writing. Poems about the past exist within a nexus of scholarly and popular historical thought. However, modern developments in the relationship between academic writing and contemporary poetry have brought them into ever closer contact. How has this affected the transmission of historical ideas between poet and reader, and what critical perspectives might we need to understand that transmission better? Creative writers have become increasingly prevalent within academic institutions over the past two decades: even the existence of this critical-creative thesis points towards a developing interaction between academic writing and poetry. This is an opportune moment to re-examine that interaction, and ask how it manifests itself in the work of poets writing about the past. In order to shed further light on these central questions, this thesis explores work by David Jones (1895-1974), Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932) and Ian Duhig (b. 1954). It focuses on the poets’ creative processes of imagining the past through a literary analysis of the poems themselves. It also examines how their ideas come into tension with conceptions of authoritative historical writing, and how the published texts of their poetry enact these tensions. This enactment of tensions makes studying the published texts of poetry central to this thesis. However, this centrality of published texts also demands a theoretical clarification: how do we understand the differences between ‘text’ and ‘poem’? As a means of approaching this question, I explore how the term ‘poem’ (in common parlance) contains many of our uses of the critical term ‘text’. Building upon this, I aim to address the tendency in contemporary poetry criticism to ascribe effects that specifically derive from a text of a poem to the ‘poem’ in general. In particular, I wish to emphasise the importance of the paratexts of poetry, such as Jones’ preface and footnotes to the Anathemata, the ‘acknowledgements’ to Hill’s Mercian Hymns, and Duhig’s ‘notes’ on The Speed of Dark. These paratexts are an integral part of the processes of composition and genesis for individual 5 texts. Other critics have considered them in this light, particularly in the case of Jones. However, where previous critics have used paratexts to supplement their interpretations of particular poems, they have often failed to highlight the role of paratexts in shaping our imaginative responses as a whole. In order to redress this oversight, I aim to draw attention to these features as an integral part of how texts convey poems to their readers. This approach centres on the following question: how do the texts of Jones, Hill and Duhig’s work shape how we imagine the past when we read their poems? Each of these three poets expresses a distinct conception of imagining the past within their work. Moreover, these ideas take shape within the texts of their poetry in different ways, as the distinctive paratexts to Jones, Hill and Duhig’s work show. In order to understand how their texts shape our imaginations, we must also understand how these texts express the poets’ underlying conceptions of the past. Hence, I address questions of our ability to reconstruct the poets’ views on imagining the past through tracing their borrowings from different historical and academic texts. As with my emphasis upon the significance of paratexts, my aim is to show that these connections between poems and historical or academic texts can have profound consequences for how we imagine the past through reading or writing poetry. This focus on paratext also drives the creative portion of this thesis, my long poem King Harold. Indeed, the critical component is an important paratext to King Harold: it reflects upon the poem’s influences, preoccupations, and connections with historical and academic texts. King Harold is a historical poem detailing the life of Harold Godwinson (c. 1022-1066). Its premise is that the poem is a composition by Harold Godwinson in his later mythical personification as a medieval ecclesiastic. Harold utilises historical sources, both mundane and fictional, to recall the details of his own life and the events surrounding the years 1022-1066. Intended to be readable as a history in itself, the poem follows Harold’s life in a narrative, chronological fashion. However, the poem also addresses the same problems of the interplay between text, imagination, and authority in historical writing that the critical component considers. This combination of creative and critical strands has particular relevance for an audience of poets: this thesis is an exploration of how poets view their own engagement with historical and academic texts. I aim to emphasise how wide and deep the chains of connections between texts can 6 be, and how the fine details of these connections can have profound impacts upon the shaping of entire volumes of poetry. Moreover, my focus on paratexts offers to heighten poets’ awareness of the importance of these features for a reader’s imaginative engagement with the past. However, this thesis is not simply an attempt to begin a critical conversation with other poets. It engages with the work of the textual critic Jerome J. McGann, as a means of teasing out and refining what we understand by a text: separating out the ‘text’ from the ‘poem’ highlights the exciting mutability of poems across different media, whether through print or performance. Such a separation underlines the different effects a poem can have on different audiences across multiple texts and performances. This separation also suggests a significant development of Linda Hutcheon and Jerome de Groot’s work on historical fiction. By exploring works of poetry rather than literary fiction, this thesis refines Hutcheon and de Groot’s work in ways that point towards a more precise understanding of how we can imagine the past through poems. This begs a further key question: why consider poetry in this thesis? A printed poem is a visual representation of a verbal utterance. Its lines and verses correspond closely with the shaping of that utterance into meaningful phrases. Hence, a poem’s organisation into lines, verses, versets (and so on) requires precise representation in a printed text. This dependence heightens a reader’s awareness of the text as a material object, making the effects of paratexts and other features of the material text more pronounced. Poetry’s increased sensitivity to its media of representation emphasises aporias that critics, such as Hutcheon and de Groot, locate in the relationship between texts and imaginative representations of the past.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Corpus Christi College the Pelican Record
    CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE THE PELICAN RECORD Vol. LI December 2015 CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE THE PELICAN RECORD Vol. LI December 2015 i The Pelican Record Editor: Mark Whittow Design and Printing: Lynx DPM Limited Published by Corpus Christi College, Oxford 2015 Website: http://www.ccc.ox.ac.uk Email: [email protected] The editor would like to thank Rachel Pearson, Julian Reid, Sara Watson and David Wilson. Front cover: The Library, by former artist-in-residence Ceri Allen. By kind permission of Nick Thorn Back cover: Stone pelican in Durham Castle, carved during Richard Fox’s tenure as Bishop of Durham. Photograph by Peter Rhodes ii The Pelican Record CONTENTS President’s Report ................................................................................... 3 President’s Seminar: Casting the Audience Peter Nichols ............................................................................................ 11 Bishop Foxe’s Humanistic Library and the Alchemical Pelican Alexandra Marraccini ................................................................................ 17 Remembrance Day Sermon A sermon delivered by the President on 9 November 2014 ....................... 22 Corpuscle Casualties from the Second World War Harriet Fisher ............................................................................................. 27 A Postgraduate at Corpus Michael Baker ............................................................................................. 34 Law at Corpus Lucia Zedner and Liz Fisher ....................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • MUH 5684 Tuesday, Period 3 | Thursday, Periods 3–4 • MUB 232 • Spring 2020 Dr
    detail from F-Pn vma ms 1068 | hand of violinist Pierre Baillot | photo by Michael Vincent Introduction to Historical Musicology MUH 5684 Tuesday, Period 3 | Thursday, Periods 3–4 • MUB 232 • Spring 2020 Dr. Michael Vincent • [email protected] • MUB 351 • Thursday & Friday period 5 Please visit me during my office hours. I’m available to discuss our course or issues of professional development. Overview We explore critical approaches to the history of musicology as an academic discipline. The readings provide an overview of fundamental concepts and methodologies, and significant musicological writings representing style periods and conceptual issues. While musicologists traditionally focus on European music in the classical tradition, we will sample scholarship that focuses on a broad range of repertoires. Students will be encouraged to approach the discipline and its history critically. This critical approach will inform your personal work, giving you the tools to investigate your own topic in novel and insightful ways. Each student will choose a “lab rat” at the beginning of the semester: an artistic period, repertoire, performer, social movement, or composer. You will investigate your lab rat using the weekly methodology, diversifying your knowledge of your chosen subject. Your lab rat may grow in unexpected ways as the semester progresses. This course has prerequisites: successful completion of the complete undergraduate music history sequence; graduate student status; and successful completion of the music history entrance exam or the review course. Expectations ❖ Reading You’re expected to come to class having completed all reading on the syllabus for that week. You must be ready to engage with the materials.
    [Show full text]
  • Notes on Heinrich Isaac's Virgo Prudentissima Author(S): Alejandro Enrique Planchart Source: the Journal of Musicology, Vol
    Notes on Heinrich Isaac's Virgo prudentissima Author(s): Alejandro Enrique Planchart Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 81-117 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2011.28.1.81 Accessed: 26-06-2017 18:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Musicology This content downloaded from 128.135.12.127 on Mon, 26 Jun 2017 18:47:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Notes on Heinrich Isaac’s Virgo prudentissima ALEJandro ENRIQUE PLANCHART Thomas Binkley in memoriam In 1520 Sigmund Grimm and Marx Wirsung published their Liber selectarum cantionum quas vulgo mutetas appellant, a choirbook that combined double impression printing in the manner of Petrucci with decorative woodcuts. As noted in the dedicatory letter by the printers and the epilogue by the humanist Conrad Peutinger, the music was selected and edited by Ludwig Senfl, who had succeeded his teacher, Heinrich Isaac, as head of Emperor Maximilian’s chapel 81 until the emperor’s death in 1519.
    [Show full text]
  • A Legendary Poet
    / Faculty Obituaries / A Legendary Poet Geoff rey Hill, lauded for his deep and complex verse | BY MARA SASSOON Sir Geoff rey Hill’s poetry— was the original Oxford University in 1953, often called “allusive” for its idea, 20 years ago, where he earned a degree esoteric religious, philosoph- for an Editorial in English and had his fi rst ical, and historical referenc- Institute to award work published by the poet es—earned him reverence degrees, doctoral and literary critic Donald in the literary community. and master’s, in Hall. After graduation, he Nicholas Lezard, a critic for editorial studies,” taught at the University The Guardian, hailed him says Ricks. of Leeds until 1980, when as “the greatest living poet Hill was known he completed a yearlong in the history of the English for his turns of Churchill Scholarship at the language” in a 2001 review phrases and quick University of Bristol. He was of Hill’s long poem Speech! humor in every- then a lecturer at Emmanuel Speech! and in a 2013 review day conversation. College, Cambridge. of his collection Broken Hier- Ricks says his In 1988, he moved to the archies: Poems 1952–2012. favorite anecdote United States when he ac- Hill, 84, a University Pro- is when Hill “was cepted a professorship at fessor emeritus and a College asked how he felt BU, where he taught for 18 of Arts & Sciences professor about a critic’s years. His multidisciplinary emeritus of literature and having won a prize expertise—he taught courses religion, died on June 30, for an essay on his not only on poetry, but also 2016, the same day his new work.
    [Show full text]
  • IMS Musicological Brainfood 3, No. 2 (2019)
    IMS Musicological Brainfood3, no. 2 (2019) Margaret Bent and Lewis Lockwood, the first re‐ books. My mother couldn’t see any need for me cipients of theIMS Guido Adler Prize (IMS GAP), to continue with education. It was a teacher at share their thoughts on how the field of musicol‐ school who made sure that I went on. But I did ogy has changed over half a century and on the encounter more obstacles along the way. My values that drive their research. mercurial and controversial mentor, Thurston Dart, put up a lot of objections to me doing Daniel K. L. Chua (DC). Good evening every‐ research, then eventually let me through—but I one.It’sgreattoseeallofyouhereattheopening reallyhadtofightforthat.IfIhadstayedinEng‐ of the Intercongressional IMS Symposium in land, I would not have had the career I’ve had. Lucerne. It is also a great honor for me to wel‐ The double move to the United States and back come two eminent and legendary musicologists to England made it all possible. If I were to start here this evening; they are the first recipients of now, it would be much easier. But at that time, I theIMSGuidoAdlerPrize.Pleasejoinmeinwel‐ didn’t have any role models, and that was not coming professors Margaret Bent and Lewis easy. I just assumed that men got the jobs. My Lockwood. [Applause.] then husband was offered a job. I did my re‐ I know that the only thing separating you search because I enjoyed it, alongside part-time from your dinner this evening is me. [Audience work and being a mother, and didn’t have any laughter.] So instead of moderating long keynote career expectations.
    [Show full text]
  • A Case Study in Hexachordal Solmization As a Guide to Musica Recta and Musica Ficta in Fifteenth-Century Vocal Music
    From the Singer's Point of View: A Case Study in Hexachordal Solmization as a Guide to Musica Recta and Musica Ficta in Fifteenth-Century Vocal Music By Daniel Zager A treatise by the sixteenth-century Papal musician Ghiselin Danckerts preserves the details of an interesting controversy among some professional singers in Rome. Presuppositions concerning modal purity together with cer­ tain ambiguities of unspecified accidentals in a Lamentation setting by the Spanish composer Juan Escribano combined to provide these performers with some difficulties in the matter of the pitches to be, sung. In his discus­ sion of this episode, Lewis Lockwood observes that "many performers of the time must have found the problem as difficult as we do today."! Our difficul­ ties in such questions of pitch, and in the concomitant consideration of edito­ rial accidentals, derive from at least two considerations. First, modern editors have not always made a consistent conceptual dis­ tinction between musica ficta and musica recta. The term musica ficta has fre­ quently been used incorrectly to embrace all of the editorial accidentals added to modern scores of Renaissance music. In fact, many of these editori­ al accidentals, specifically many Bhs, may be explained and should be under­ stood in terms of the standard system of musica recta as delineated in the gamut, the theoretical framework by which the fifteenth-century composer and singer defined musical space! Musicaficta, on the other hand, refers only to pitches outside of the gamut. The distinction is crucial, for while the fif­ teenth-century singer, and, by implication, his modern counterpart, would normally avoid entering ficta hexachords unless necessary, there was simply no reason to avoid the Bhs of musica recta.
    [Show full text]
  • Margaret Bent Publication List.Pdf
    Margaret Bent Classified list of publications (excluding short reviews) (last updated September 2009) Counterpoint, musica ficta, compositional process , musical grammar Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta (New York: Routledge, 2002). A collection of eleven essays related to compositional techniques, all but two previously published over the last thirty years, to which I have added a substantial new introduction updating my views and answering critics. Includes items marked * below. *"Musica Recta and Musica Ficta", Musica Disciplina 26 (1972), 73-100. Reprinted as pp. 1-28 in The Garland Library of the History of Western Music; Medieval Music II: Polyphony, ed. Ellen Rosand (New York: Garland, 1985). *"Some Factors in the Control of Consonance and Sonority: Successive Composition and the Solus tenor", pp. 625-34 in International Musicological Society: Report of the Twelfth Congress, Berkeley 1977, ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981). *"Resfacta and Cantare super librum", Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983), 371-91. A shorter version appeared as "Resfacta und Cantare super librum", Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft/ Annales Suisses de Musicologie, n. s. 3 (1983), 47-52. *"Diatonic Ficta", Early Music History 4 (1984), 1-48. French translation as "Musica ficta: une procédure diatonique", pp. 15-78 in Lire, composer, analyser à la Renaissance, Introduction and translation by Annie Coeurdevey (Minerve, CESR "Ricercar", Tours, 2003). *"Diatonic ficta revisited: Josquin's Ave Maria in context", Music Theory Online, September 1996 (http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/): response to Roger Wibberley, "Josquin's Ave Maria: Musica Ficta versus Mode", Music Theory Online, 2.5, 1996. My article includes an essential corrective to "Diatonic Ficta".
    [Show full text]
  • The End of the Word in Geoffrey Hill's Poetry
    CONSUMMATUM EST: THE END OF THE WORD IN GEOFFREY HILL’S POETRY THOMAS MICHAEL DOCHERTY PEMBROKE COLLEGE DECEMBER 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. CONSUMMATUM EST: THE END OF THE WORD IN GEOFFREY HILL’S POETRY THOMAS MICHAEL DOCHERTY This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose.
    [Show full text]
  • Ann Hassan's Annotations to Geoffrey Hill's Speech!
    Annotations to Geoffrey Hill's Speech! Speech! ANN HASSAN Annotations to Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! Annotations to Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! Ann Hassan Glossator Special Editions ANNOTATIONS TO GEOFFREY HILL’S SPEECH! SPEECH! © Ann Hassan, 2012. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This work is ‘Open Access,’ which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2012 by Glossator Special Editions, an imprint of punctum books (Brooklyn, NY) for Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary (glossator.org). Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing.
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Poems: from Modernism to Now
    Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now Edited by Hélène Aji and Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now, Edited by Hélène Aji and Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Hélène Aji and Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4124-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4124-5 Published with the support of Université de Caen-Basse Normandie (ERIBIA EA 2610) and of Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (CREA EA 370) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Let us go then, you and I”............................................................. 1 Chapter One ...................................................................................................................... 5 “Dear Shade”: Louis MacNeice Selected and Recollected Susan Ang Chapter Two ...................................................................................................................23 Evaluating the Status of Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos David Ten Eyck Chapter Three ................................................................................................................41
    [Show full text]
  • Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns WILLIAM S
    Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns WILLIAM S. MILNE N Mercian Hymns (1971) Geoffrey Hill discovers in the history and topography of his native West Midlands a Iparticular rhythm of life which he succeeds in conveying in the poem by an informing mythology and an analogous prose rhythm. He builds his poem around the figure of Offa who is not only the eighth century king of historical fact but also the imaginatively-conceived "presiding genius of the West Midlands."1 Hill praised George Eliot, the great novelist of the West Midlands, for being "a writer with a fine sense of traditional life" and in discussing a passage from Chapter 18 of Adam Bede, in which Adam listens to the "recurrent responses, and the familiar rhythm" of Anglican hymns or "collects", he generalized upon the subject of rhythm, adumbrating ideas which are directly relevant to his poetic method in Mercian Hymns: The responses are to be understood both as recurring within the limited time-span of a particular Anglican evensong, following the established pattern of the rubric, and as recurring over an implied and indefinite number of years, recurring Sunday by Sunday, season by season, year after year. It is by such means that "channels" are created; by the joint working of abrasion and continuity. "Responses" is the correct term for the established form of congregational participation in the liturgy. At the same time, over and below this literal meaning, the word connotes the continuity of human response in general to an ancient process of parochial and national life. The collects of the Anglican Church are composed of liturgical prose; they could properly be said to possess rhythm, though not metre .
    [Show full text]
  • A Reading of Geoffrey Hill's a Treatise of Civil Power
    1 The Redemption of History: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power Geoffrey Hill practises a kind of aesthetic austerity of style in A Treatise of Civil Power (2005/2007) that in the end must be reckoned a part of its meaning, its vision of the body politic, power, and culture.1 Three elements combine in this respect: difficulty (so called), the constraining or tamping down of the lyric voice, and subject-matter. In relation to Hill “difficulty” is a hoary trope, and should not be exaggerated here. A good number of the thirty-one poems present only a modest level of difficulty to the patient reader; however, others, such as “On Reading Milton and the English Revolution” and “A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power,” are challenging, and their challenge, a deliberate recalcitrance to easy- 1 A Treatise of Civil Power exists in three versions: (1) the original limited-edition pamphlet, Clutag Press, Thame (2005); (2) the version published by Yale University Press in the US and Penguin in the UK (2007); and the version quoted here, in Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 557–601. The essential argument and vision of the collection— my main concern—is the same in the different versions. (2) and (3) do not vary much: (3) shortens “On Reading Crowds and Power” to its first verse-paragraph, deleting the three other sections, and leaves out altogether “On Reading Burke on Empire, Liberty and Reform.” When I refer to the latter, I use the Penguin text.
    [Show full text]