Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill
Online ISBN:
9781781703359
Print ISBN:
9780719067549
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book
Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill
Published:
12 January 2006
Online ISBN:
9781781703359
Print ISBN:
9780719067549
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cite
Wainwright, Jeffrey, Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Manchester , 2006; online edn, Manchester Scholarship Online, 19 July 2012), https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719067549.001.0001, accessed 16 Apr. 2024.
Abstract
Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. The book shows how Hill's words are never lightly ‘acceptable’ but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by—words that are ‘getting it right’. It is a comprehensive critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form.
Contents
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Front Matter
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1
‘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”’
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End Matter
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