English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Writing - General & Miscellaneous, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 16th-17th Century - Literary Criticism, Literature, Christian, English Language Reference - General
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
In this, his first collection of essays in more than a decade, Geoffrey Hill addresses matters crucial to the task of the writer and to the life of a reader -- matters of style and faith. It is a matter of great difficulty -- and of great artistic and moral responsibility -- for a writer to find words and forms fitting for the truth. It is also a matter of great difficulty for readers to recognize, with both a critical mind and a receptive heart, truly inspired writing when they experience it -- to seize that instant when, in Hill's words, they receive a sense of things inaccessible suddenly made accessible, and of grammar and desire miraculously at one. "The effect may appear to be studied (as in Milton or Hopkins) or spontaneous (as in the Wesleys or Wordsworth)," but, if we are alive to it, "what delights and silences us is the sustained moment of communion between eloquence and apprehension." In these seven essays, whose subjects include the Holy Bible and its English translators, and Hobbes's Leviathan and its contemporary critics, Hill shows us that in most instances, and despite the best intentions, style and faith remain obdurately apart. But he also shows us that when the two are in accord, as they are in certain works by Hooker, Burton, Herbert, Vaughan, and Donne, poetry and prose are something more than a momentary stay against confusion; they are witnesses against the enemies of truth.Editorials
A. N. Wilson
Geoffrey Hill is probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose.—Evening Standard
William Logan
[Hill's essays] are among the most painstaking [and] brilliant analyses of literature in our century, and have expanded on his poetry's concerns for the guilts and guiles of language and the moral recognitions of the word.—The New Criterion
Book Details
Published
April 24, 2003
Publisher
Counterpoint
Pages
224
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781582431079