"Reading Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings feels a lot like what it might to step into a graduate seminar in 19th and 20th century poetry without having taken the prerequisite courses, or completed the required reading.
It will not be immediately understood by “a common well-educated, thoughtful man of ordinary talents;” or, for that matter, by anyone of extraordinary intelligence who hasn’t read with great care at least some of the works of, among others, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, W.B.Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom.
The volume is filled with references and brief quotes which tee up the complex thoughts of renowned philosophers, literary scholars, and poet / critics, so that Hill can knock them around. And this he does wonderfully well in a collection of bracingly argumentative essays that scrap with almost everything and everyone they touch: T.S. Eliot is crass, alienated and unfocused; John Crowe Ransom does not make points “at all well”; British poet Laurence Binyon’s “critical imagination is lacking.”
Hill tussles with, contradicts, and explores all species of idea: poetic versus real-world justice; complicity, revelation, and the poet’s involvement with language; creative response to "triumphs that trap, and defeats that liberate." They’re typically opposed, worried, torn apart, and left, at the end of their chapters, to hang out on clever, often puzzling concluding lines. Consider these two pronouncements…"
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