Matthew Sperling
Published: 2014-03
Total Pages: 217
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This book-length study of the poetry and critical writing of Geoffrey Hill, one of the major post-war writers in English, combines nuanced and incisive close reading with detailed scholarship and fresh archival work. Hill's work is examined in relation to the history of language and of the study of language, with key chapters dedicated to the linguistic ideas of the Oxford English Dictionary and its founder, Richard Chenevix Trench, and of scholar-poets GerardManley Hopkins and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The final two chapters consider the basis for a poetic theology of language founded in the myths of linguistic fallenness and original sin. In the range of itsattention and the depth of its scholarship, this book represents one of the fullest and most authoritative accounts of the work of a living writer in recent years.
