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Reinvention in the Line of Death: A Reconsideration of Geoffrey Hill's Commemorative Verse

This paper considers the embodied ethics of Geoffrey Hills poetic practice. Hill stages his engagement with poetry through the idioms, images, tropes, and diction of the literary tradition. Through this pragmatic rehearsal of the language of the dead, Hills poetry projects the tradition into the present. Hill resists the ethical entrapments of appropriative poetry through his insistence upon the brute physicality of atrocity and through a rigorous (for both poet and reader) formal difficulty. Hills practice refuses to console after the models of Peter Sacks, Jahan Ramazani, or John Vickery. Instead, concerned with modernitys disconnectedness, Hills poetry returns us to the presence of the dead, to their ritual and language. Alternatively, because Hills subjects are historical atrocities, rather than natural occurrences, the sort of communal consolation that the elegy traditionally offered would be inappropriate to Hills concerns. These atrocities are, most frequently, instances of human violence (the Holocaust, the Battle of Towton, the Wars of the Roses, etc.) and, for this reason, they do not lend themselves to the consolations of natural cycles of death and rebirth. Since they were often committed in the name of religion, Christian transcendence is similarly questionable, as are other consolatory transcendences. These conventional modes of consolation being denied, Hills poetry reconnects us with the dead through the formal devices and techniques of the historical institution of poetry. Through the rigorous engagement with and sacrificial making of poetry, Hill attempts to redeem tradition and history for the present.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-05292009-093331
Date01 June 2009
CreatorsBartch, Michael Christopher
ContributorsDr. Paul Dietrich, Dr. Ashby Kinch, Dr. Robert Baker
PublisherThe University of Montana
Source SetsUniversity of Montana Missoula
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05292009-093331/
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