Language, Value, and Civic Responsibility: Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings

Geoffrey Hill's readings in Collected Critical Writings are at times unforgivingly trenchant, and at times joltingly innovative, as his essays grapple with the works of writers varying from Dryden to Emerson and Isaac Rosenberg, always infused with methodical consideration for the finesse of their language, and the subtleties underlying their choice of words. Such careful consideration of detail enables Hill to achieve arguably some of his most telling insights as a critic, such as, for instance, his construal of doctrinal poetry as having its meaning ultimately elucidated by that "gift of techne" which is anything but doctrine, as expressed in "Language, Suffering, and Silence." Yet what emerges from his individual accounts of language as an artistic means employed by particular writers, is a more general preoccupation with the nature of language itself as a medium; most importantly, language is to Hill, as he himself writes in the first essay of the volume-"Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement'," a "most impure" artistic medium. It is now, following Hill's death in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and given the instability of the global political climate and the rise of populism, that Hill's own heightened sense of history becomes highly relevant. It will be argued, then, that Hill's view that language is implicated in the past atrocities of history, from the persecution of the Catholic martyrs in Elizabethan times to the rise of Nazi Germany, runs through his collected volume to such a great extent, that the moral gravitas of linguistic choice can be regarded as making up the backbone of his critical reflections.