Geoffrey Hill, edited by Kenneth Haynes
Collected Critical Writings.
Oxford University Press, 832 pages, $49.95
Geoffrey Hill’s prose shares with his verse an uncompromising strenuousness and denseness of allusion; his train of thought halts at all stations. Collected Critical Writings is not a book which will win over those who have decided that Hill is aloof and inaccessible. I suspect this would not worry him unduly, given his impatience, in the course of a diagnosis of the flabbiness of contemporary religious language, with the view that readers should be protected “from the jeopardy of cultural embarrassment or the faintest possibility of mental or emotional strain.”
The collection brings together Hill’s previously published critical books, The Lords of Limit (1984), The Enemy’s Country (1991), and Style and Faith (2003), together with uncollected and unpublished work, mostly lectures, in two groups conceived as distinct though related sequences, Inventions of Value and Alienated Majesty. The range of interest is chronologically broad (sixteenth to twentieth century) and generically narrow. There is almost nothing on the novel, apart from some valuable remarks on George Eliot, and little on the drama, although the essay on Jonson’s tragedies (1960) is one of the few that have appreciated those powerful, neglected plays. Shakespeare receives attention mainly in an essay on Cymbeline(1969), which, while stimulating in its examination of the Baconian element of experiment in the play, now looks rather out of date (there is little evidence generally, by the way, of the revisions which
