Collected Critical Writings

Front Cover
OUP Oxford, Feb 29, 2008 - Literary Criticism - 832 pages
The Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill 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.
 

Contents

THE LORDS OF LIMIT
1
THE ENEMYS COUNTRY
171
STYLE AND FAITH
261
INVENTIONS OF VALUE
381
ALIENATED MAJESTY
491
Editorial Note
581
Abbreviations
585
Notes
586
Index
757
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About the author (2008)

Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England on June 18 1932. He received a first in English literature at Oxford University. He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Genesis, King Log, The Triumph of Love, Mercian Hymns, A Treatise of Civil Power, Odi Barbare, and Broken Hierarchies. He received several awards including the Faber Memorial prize and the Whitbread for his poetry. He was knighted for his services to literature in 2012. He was also an essayist. His collections of essays included The Lords of Limit, The Enemy's Country, Style and Faith, and Collected Critical Writings, which won the Truman Capote award for literary criticism in 2008. He died suddenly on June 30, 2016 at the age of 84.

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