Geoffrey Hill PDF

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Geoffrey Hill...

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Geoffrey Hill - One of the features that characterizes post-1950s poetry is its treatment of selfreflexivity: literature about literature, poetry about poetry, plays about plays - Challenges, technical and moral, of being a poet in the wake of the First and Second World Wars - Hill always been interested in what poets do in the face of violence: sees poetry as being able to and even obliged to memorialise the victims of historical wrongs - He is also suspicious of his own impulses and many of his poems asks whether his writing might ultimately be aestheticizing horror, making art out of other people’s suffering - Ambiguous: no single correct interpretation - The ‘ars poetica’ poem - Poems can be self-reflexive about their form e.g. sonnets about sonnets - Poems can be self-reflexive about their metre and rhythm - Poems can be self-reflexive about meaning (how poetry communicates idea) - Self-reflexivity about what poetry is for, socially and ethically – Hill - ‘I believe that it is inevitable that any serious poetry written at the present time will be inextricably caught up in politics’ - Word choice – ethical act o Arena of activity when your ethical status is made or broken o When you choose one word over another, you are necessarily making a moral choice Complex Language as a political force - Complexity vs the tyranny of simplicity - Poetry for hill, is one way to send complex language out into the world oversimplified spin Poetry as Memorialisation - Lack of national memory Two Formal Elegies - Sombre dedication: ‘for the Jews in Europe’ - Poem reflects Hill’s aims in having art reconcile the horrors of history and using poetry as a healing force - Poem resurrects in a way, those who died during the Holocaust, allowing them to speak across time - Two sonnets implore us to never forget what happened - First sonnet: speaks of the dead in two different manners o One hand the dead are subdued and buried, on the other hand they are active o Second sonnet begins with a focus o the dead’s long death – arduous time spent in concentration camps – also echoes the first sonnet’s call for remembrance Ovid in the Third Reich - Short poem: two quatrains of accentual verse: line is governed by the number of stressed syllables - Dramatic monologue in which the poet speak, in the personal of the ancient Roman poet Ovid - Title places him in the third Reich of Adolf Hitler’s Germany

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Hill intends a parallel between these two period: compare in several ways o Both states were totalitarian o Such a think as correct thinking o Deviation form general opinion was frowned upon o Both rulers tended to be puritanical in their habits and tastes o Women expected to be mothers etc o Expression of art, literature and the free spirit were severely curbed to accommodate the purposes of the state Question arises as to what a poet such as Ovid can and should do under a vicious, stultifying and brutal dictatorship

September Song - Elegy of a 10-year-old Jew killed in the Nazi concentration camps - Poem ironic about man’s inhumanity to human beings - Poem is a mock-elegy: written in the form of a conversation with the child that has been killed in a tone that sounds as if the speaker is one of the detached and apathetic observers of the horrible execution of the Jews - Epitaph – thinks written on a tombstone - Mourning song: September means the winter season – connotations of death - Poem also a sonnet - Claims that the speaker has written the elegy for his own satisfaction: also comments on the present life he is living - Images of horror in the environment - Poem ends on a note of despair on the prospect of humanity - Elegy is a frontal assault on the inhumanity of the Nazi extremism of the Second World War in particular and a satire on the savagery on all wars Funeral Music - Sequence about the Wars of the Roses - Heartlessness is not Hill’s - 8 sonnets in blank verse - initial sonnet describes the execution of John Tiptoft – as a Christian he welcomed death as a means of attaining a higher spiritual state - poet suggests than an attitude like Tiptoft’s may conceal a strong will to power: Tiptoft may seek fame for his discipline through the acclaim others accord him - main assertion is that human beings are incapable of penetrating the world...