Acceptable words : essays on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill
"Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry 'recognises that words fail us'. These essays explore Hill's struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. He is a poet of phenomenal verbal power who knows the dangers of indulging such power. His poetry draws to light the greatest intimacies and the most stunning and fleeting of his apprehensions. It is also public in its contemplation of ethics, history and politics. His ear for public discourse ranges from seventeenth-century politics and theology to the nightly news and the celebrity-spread. This book seeks to show how all his work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance, whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic
Print Book, English, 2005
Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, Manchester, UK, New York, 2005
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 155 pages ; 23 cm
9780719067549, 0719067545
61425442
AcknowledgementsShort Titles1. ‘Acceptable Words’2. ‘The speechless dead’: 'King Log' (1968)3. Poet, lover, liar: ‘Lachrimae’ (1975)4. ‘Our love is what we love to have’: 'Tenebrae' (1978) 5. Things and words: 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy' (1983)6. History as poetry: 'Churchill’s Funeral’ and 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis’ (Canaan, 1996)7. 'The Triumph of Love' (1998)8. ‘Beauty is difficult’: 'Speech! Speech!' (2000)9. ‘Here and there I pull a flower’: 'The Orchards of Syon' (2002)10. ‘In wintry solstice like the shorten’d light’: 'Scenes from Comus' (2005)11. Afterword: ‘”I have not finished”’Notes and referencesBibliography -- .