Passionate Intelligence The Poetry Of Geoffrey Hill

How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers--including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

What is the relationship between poetry and power? Should poetry be considered a mode of authority or an impotent medium? And why is it that the modern poets most commonly regarded as authoritative are precisely those whose works wrestle with a sense of artistic inadequacy? Such questions lie at the heart of Shades of Authority, prompting fresh insights into three of the most important poets of recent decades: Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Through attentive close readings, James shows how their responsiveness to matters of political and cultural import lends weight to the idea of poetry as authoritative utterance—but also how each is exercised by a sense of the limitations and liabilities of language itself.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date 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. It aims to contribute something to the understanding of his poetry among those who have followed it for many years and students and other readers encountering this major poet for the first time.

A comprehensive reference presents over five hundred full essays on authors and a variety of topics, including censorship, genre, patronage, and dictionaries.

The T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation provides an expansive range of resources introducing the doctrine of creation as understood in Christian traditions. It offers an examination of: how the Bible and various Christian traditions have imagined creation; how the doctrine of creation informs and is informed by various dogmatic commitments; and how the doctrine of creation relates to a range of human concerns and activities. The Handbook represents a celebration of, fascination with, bewilderment at, lament about, and hope for all that is, and serves as a scholarly, innovative, and constructive reference for those interested in attending to what Christian belief has to contribute to thinking about and living with the mysterious existence named 'creation'.

The development of Geoffrey Hill's verse over 30years is like the topography of his homeground in the West Midlands of En­gland. There are hills and valleys but no wholly unexpected shifts of contour. Henry Hart has completed the first comprehensive mapping of this new po­etic landscape and finds Hill a deeply tra­ditional poet capable of writing in a vari­ety of forms, but also one who used his superior skills to debate tradition. Hart begins the discussion of Hill's work with selections written during his Oxford days in the early 1950s. The poet's themes of passion, crisis, and the struggle toward perception and control were then finding their early focus in the quest for intense vision and right judgment. The post-Oxford works--Forthe Un-fallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, and Tenebrae--alongwith Hill's most recent poem, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, all display verbal power, skill with forms, and sensuously and metaphysically informed intelligence.

This textbook, based on extensive teaching experience,makes new insights from linguistic and literary scholarship accessible to students in their daily practice of reading, analysing and evaluating literary texts.This textbook provides a thought-provoking introduction to the practice of literary stylistics. It is based on extensive teaching experience, and makes new insights from linguistic and literary scholarship accessible to students in their daily practice of reading, analysing and evaluating literary texts.The twelve chapters, written by experts in the field, provide a firm foundation for the development of language and context-based literary criticism. The book allows students to increase their creative responsiveness to the interplay between text and context, and between language and social situation.