Difficulties of Civic Speech: the Later Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

我的专著，题为“公民言论的困难：杰弗里·希尔的后期诗歌”，以围绕杰弗里·希尔的批评争议为出发点之一，他被誉为我们这个时代或任何时代的主要诗人，并被怨恨地指责为完全反对流行的精英主义——这一争议在许多方面象征着20世纪70年代诗歌战争后英国诗歌的分裂。与其站在争论的一方或另一方，我想研究希尔的诗歌是如何在偶然事件和接受的环境中形成的，诗歌行为被认为是对支持者和反对者的反应，通常是反对，诗歌能够将两者的声音和观点吸收到它的复调织体中。着眼于希尔诗歌的现代主义遗产，这本书考虑了诗歌困难在作者和听众之间的关系中的作用，以及这种关系的政治相关性。正如希尔所做的那样，它试图质问，主张权威，诗意的和政治的意味着什么，是什么让“我”有资格为集体，“我们”说话。就像一个诗意的典故，或者像一个笑话，希尔表明，“我们”可以同时具有包容性和排他性，暗示着“我们”和“他们”，但我认为是站在边缘的读者，他们没有完全“理解”希尔，而不是狂热者，矛盾的是，他们是接受他的最佳位置。需要AHRC休假来完成专著的最后两章。这些是，教会政体的法则，基督教诗人，就像难相处的诗人一样，总是处于疏远读者的危险中，读者不是俱乐部的一员，也就是说，不是“我们”中的一员，而是“他们”中的一员。希尔小心翼翼地披上了那件斗篷，他意识到基督教可能既是正义的来源，也是不公正的来源。虽然他“自己看不出有什么办法能逃脱对原罪教义的完全赞同”，但他的诗歌指出了原罪教义和其他方面的灰色地带，通过努力解决一个矛盾的命题，即基督教迫使人们同情和理解它在制度上排斥的“他们”，正如希尔的诗歌所做的那样。因此，其他信仰的矛盾和对立的观点，不可知论者，无神论者，持不同政见者，都在希尔身上找到了自己的位置，质疑诗歌权威的本质，以及与宗教权威的关系。弥尔顿的缪斯：本章试图探索，如果可能的话，综合希尔对弥尔顿生活和工作的多方面的参与。弥尔顿，尤其是《失乐园》的诗人，例证了一种语言神学，希尔对此很感兴趣，语言是道德困境的一部分，是道德困境的体现，而不是对它的评论。他说弥尔顿是结合的大师，一种技巧，他借用了霍普金斯的术语，结合了诗歌的“命令”和“纪念性”，它的语言节奏使它的惰性结构充满活力，一种技巧，承载了他自己诗歌的纪念性愿望和这些构成的道德困境。但他也把目光从不朽的弥尔顿转向了更边缘的弥尔顿：《科玛斯》中的弥尔顿，在希尔的《科玛斯的场景》中，根据弥尔顿对诗歌的定义，弥尔顿对诗歌的定义是“简单，感性和激情”，一方面更困难，另一方面更感性。在希尔的《论公民权力》中，政治和散文被放在了最重要的位置，随着希尔写了一些论文，就像弥尔顿十四行诗的标题一样，政治背景很重要。这种贬低的可能性是希尔作品中类似的紧张关系的来源，一个评论家认为弥尔顿“对读者责任的高度认识”和他对“轻信和不幸的羊群”的简短驳斥。

My monograph, entitled 'Difficulties of Civic Speech: the Later Poetry of Geoffrey Hill', takes as one of its starting points the critical controversy surrounding Geoffrey Hill, who has been variously acclaimed as a major poet of our, or any, time, and resentfully accused of an elitism wholly averse to what is popular - a controversy in many ways emblematic of the divisions in British poetry in the aftermath of the Poetry Wars of the 1970s. Rather than coming down on one side or the other of this debate, I want to examine how Hill's poetry is wrought amid the contingencies and circumstances of its reception, the poetic act conceived as a reaction to, and often against, both proponent and opponent, the poem capable of assimilating the voices and perspectives of both into its polyphonic textures. With an eye to the modernist legacies of Hill's poetry, the book considers the role of poetic difficulty in the relationship between author and audience, and the political correlatives of this relationship. It seeks to interrogate, as does Hill, what it means to claim authority, poetic and political, what entitles the 'I' to speak of and for the collective, the 'we'. Like a poetic allusion, or like a joke, Hill shows, 'we' can be inclusive and exclusive at once, implying an 'us' and 'them', yet I argue it is the reader who stands on the margins, who doesn't altogether 'get' Hill, rather than the aficionado, who, paradoxically, is best placed to receive him. AHRC leave is required to complete the final two chapters of the monograph. These are:The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: the Christian poet, like the difficult poet, is always in danger of the alienating the reader who is not in the club, so to speak, not one of 'us' but one of 'them'. Hill takes on that mantle warily, aware that Christianity may be both a source of justice and injustice. Though he 'cannot myself see any way of escaping complete assent to the doctrine of original sin', his poetry points to grey areas of that and other aspects of doctrine, by way of grappling with the paradoxical proposition that Christianity compels compassion and understanding of the 'them' it institutionally excludes, as Hill's poetry does. Thus the ambivalent and oppositional perspectives of other faiths, of the agnostic, the atheist, the dissenter, all find their place in Hill, questioning the nature of poetic authority as well as, and in relation to, religious authority.Milton as Muse: This chapter attempts to explore, and if possible to synthesize, Hill's multmultifaceted engagement with the life and work of John Milton. Milton, particularly the poet of 'Paradise Lost', exemplifies a theology of language to which Hill is greatly drawn, whereby language is part of, an embodiment of, the moral dilemma, rather a commentary upon it. He has spoken of Milton as the master of enjambment, a technique which combines - his terms borrowed from Hopkins - the 'bidding' and the 'monumentality' of the verse, its speech rhythms energizing its inert structure - a technique which bears on the monumental aspirations of his own verse and the moral dilemmas these pose. But he has also looked askance from the monumental to the more marginal Milton: the Milton of 'Comus', who in Hill's 'Scenes from Comus' strains the erudition of a poet imperfectly according to Milton's definition of poetry as 'simple, sensuous and passionate', more difficult on the one hand, more sensual on the other. In Hill's 'A Treatise of Civil Power', the politics and the prose are brought to the fore, with the detraction which may follow upon Hill's writing certain treatises, to paraphrase the title of Milton's sonnet, very much in the political background. The possibility of such detraction is the source of an analogous tension within Hill's writing between what one commentator has identified as Milton's 'elevated sense of his readers' responsibility' and his curt dismissals of the 'credulous and hapless herd'.