'Grinding the Textures of Harmony': Heroic Difficulty in Geoffrey Hill's Clavics'

Real appreciation of Geoffrey Hill’s The Daybooks has been slow. In relation to Clavics (2011), the fourth ‘Daybook’, the issue of his ‘difficulty’ has again come to the fore in responses. Actually, so-called difficulty may have less to do with stylistic features or allusion than with questions concerning Hill’s arguments and his Christian humanism. This essay sets up a Gradum ad Parnassum of ‘difficulty’, moving from a relatively easy poem to one at the highest level of challenge. It looks at this collection’s engagement with seventeenth-century music and religious faith. This is focused on Hill’s view of the royal composer William Lawes (1602–1645), who he sees as a heroic figure struggling to fulfil the true mission of the artist amid the ill-temper and chaos of his times: the ‘world in its rot’. The conclusion here is that Clavics is not some ne plus ultra of difficulty, but a boldly original lyric sequence, interrogating the true role of the artist, and other figures, in relation to the discords of national history

'The Argument of Geoffrey Hill's Odi Barbare'

Geoffrey Hill’s recent collections of verse are parts of a longer sequence called The Daybooks. Each volume tends to have a particular focus or argument. Odi Barbare (2012), the volume examined here in depth, is no exception. It fifty-two quasi-modernist odes deploy a poetic form gleaned from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Though diverse in subject matter, these lyrics highlight notable themes: evil, historical memory, the failure of capitalism, the role of art, and the presence of the divine in nature. These themes cohere into the exposition of a larger Christian vision, both personal and profound

'Wales and the Spirit: Reading Geoffrey Hill's Oraclau | Oracles'

This essay gives an account of the overall shape and purpose of Geoffrey Hill’s richly detailed poem Oraclau | Oracles (2010), and provides a heuristic by which to read its individual sections. The poem emerges as a rich meditation on the culture and spirit of Welsh-language Wales, with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (lover of north Wales) at its core. Hill is himself a religious poet in the mode of Blake or Hopkins, the apparent complexity or eccentricity of his style being one of the ways in which he seeks to rearrange our vision of the world. The poem’s dense, highly formalistic manner is part of its attack on contemporary materialism. Symbolically Wales becomes a locus of resistance to the predominant secularist values of England

'The Redemption of History: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power'

This article provides a close reading of Geoffrey Hill’s late volume A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), with significant detail on the main poems. It shows how it forms an organized whole, where the parts add up to a larger vision of the body politic, power, and culture. The collection's attempt to read history as intelligible, as the ground of our thinking about thinking, is a careful challenge to progressivist and secularist assumptions. To articulate its vision the collection practises a deliberate ascesis of thought and word in relation to often tragic subject matter

'Merlin's Debt in Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes', Lines 170-71

This article looks in detail what has long been regarded as a crux of meaning in Keats's 'The Eve of St. Agnes': the last two lines of stanza 19, i.e. lines 170-71: 'Never on such a night have lovers met, / Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt'. Early commentators, including Leigh Hunt, admitted to finding the basic meaning of the comparison here baffling, and modern commentators often note the lines as 'puzzling', uncertain, or ambiguous. The article proposes a clear reading of the lines, and begins to trace some of its implications in terms of how we read the poem as a whole

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”

This essay identifies and explores the intertextual relationship between Browning’s crucial mid-career poem, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” and Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” affirming the latter as the crucial inter-text for the former. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” is revealed as a metatextual commentary, providing an interesting mid-nineteenth-century perspective on Keats’s ode, where we can see aspects of the tension in Browning’s sensibility between “Hebrew” and “Hellene” playing themselves out

'Reading Browning Intertextually: "A Toccata of Galuppi's" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

This essay is a close reading of Browning's crucial mid-career poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's". It identifies and explores the intertextual relationship between “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” affirming the latter as the crucial inter-text for the former. “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” is revealed as a metatextual commentary, providing an interesting midnineteenth-century perspective on Keats’s ode, where we can see aspects of the tension in Browning’s sensibility between “Hebrew” and “Hellene” being played out