Customer Reviews

Collected Critical Writings

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Students of Hill should know that there is much in this "Collected" that does not appear in his previously published volumes. It is dense and tough going (and has the virtue of making Hill's great poetry appear pellucid). However, the rewards are great if one reads the prose in the same way one would read the poetry -- pausing after the difficult sentences, struggling with the references, working through the knots. I find the newer, previously unpublished work more congenial than the earlier essays. Just as Hill seems to have discovered a new kind of fluency in his poetry in the '90s, so too his prose seems more reader-friendly. Hill stands to the second half of the 20th century as Yeats stands to the first; they are the poet-theorists one returns to. In both cases, it is the poetry that is truly imperishable, but it is the prose that provides a glimpse into the workshop whence the poetry emanates.

is a phrase from Thoreau which Hill considers as a springboard in the final group of essays in this volume (essays addressing poetics of Emerson, Hopkins, Eliot, and Whitman, among others).

While I'm thrilled to have Hill's essays all in one place as reference, I admit, they are weary going. I certainly agree with the first reviewer: the terse, compressed language of these essays makes Hill's poetry appear in its true form: seriously beautiful poetry. Modern readers who complain over the difficulty of Hill's poetry need not bother with this volume, in this collection, Hill is intertextual on a very serious level with English history, prose, and poetry; the weight of Hill's intellectual background and a lifetime of academia have a heavy hand to play in the text, as should be expected.

If you want insight into Hill's intellectual process without reading his critical writings, it can be done. I recommend Eliot's selected essays (a volume Hill has owned since his youth), Hopkins' poetry (but especially his journals and letters), and of course get you to some Milton (especially his political sonnets & prose tracts, and his "masque" or play "Comus").

Good luck.