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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-05292009-093331 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Creators | Bartch, Michael Christopher |
| Contributors | Dr. Paul Dietrich, Dr. Ashby Kinch, Dr. Robert Baker |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05292009-093331/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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