Answerable Forms: Poetry, ethics, and public responsibility after Eliot

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill have both probed the ethical and social value of poetry in their critical prose. Heaney'sfear that 'song constituted a betrayal of suffering' leads John Dennison (2010) to define his poetics as one of 'adequacy':seeking to confront, and yet to transcend, the brutality of human experience. Meanwhile, Hill's desire for 'atonement',whereby semantic 'density' might sufficiently recognise the 'empirical guilt' involved in using language, is read by TimKendall (2006) as prompting ethically self-aware, rather than aesthetically self-indulgent, acts of humane witness in hispoetry. What interests me in both these accounts, however, is their implicit admission that poetic form and languagemust at times be answerable for ethical failings. For Heaney and Hill, I am suggesting, the 'charge' of a poet'sresponsibility is liable to become a 'charge' of accusation (or self-accusation). My PhD thesis will explore howconsciously 'public' poets, especially Heaney and Hill, have assumed that 'charge', carefully negotiating-and sometimesresisting-political and ethical responsibilities in order to carve out conscientious modes of writing. In particular, I willexamine how poems and their publics register the medium's power to deceive, seduce, and disturb, considering theanxieties such recognitions can create: about what constitutes 'good'-and, more interestingly, 'bad'-poetic language.