Geoffrey Hill is University Professor at Boston University. He holds an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Leeds and is an Honorary Fellow of both Keble College, Oxford and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Amongst many other recognitions of his work as a poet, he has received the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Award. He gave the Clark Lectures, on which this book is based, in 1986. 'Well done!' is a familiar cry with a complex sense. It may applaud the merest knack, patronize a decent competence, or squarely recognize something at once finely-achieved and morally just. The language of true valuing is constantly shadowed by parodies of itself - sales-talk, sociable politeness, or gush. The Enemy's Country is concerned with the ways in which judgement is conveyed through language, and with the difficulty of clearing the terms of judgement not from but for the pressures of circumstance so that what is said may be fitting. Poetry has sometimes been credited with a special place as a form of conduct in language, as if it were a world of words of its own from which the poet masterfully dispenses a distinctly free speech. These essays enquire whether such high praises, even when sincere, are apt to the real conditions of poets' work, to their share of drudgery, their fears of misapprehension or their need to please, to the entanglements of meaning in historical communities. The 'sheer perfection' of lyric utterance is shown to involve a recognition and acceptance of the poet's place in 'the scheme of things', a scheme of business and accommodation which is not ideally clean but which remains a ground of the art's refinement. Dryden is at the centre of the book. Around his exemplary figure, Geoffrey Hill describes with biting erudition and minutely sympathetic imagination the perplexities and felicity of genius in writers such as Donne, Hobbes, and Marvell. The book closes with a study of Pound's 'Envoi:1919' in which Hill, characteristically, brings together humour, scrupulousness, and enquiring commitment to the hopes of poetry. The Enemy's Country enacts 'virtue's struggle to clear and maintain its own meaning amid the commonplace approximation, the common practice of men'.
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“He is the most powerful living poet.”—New Republic
“The interest of these essays as part of the Hill oeuvre should not obscure their value as a contribution to seventeenth-century literary studies. They represent an exacting and meticulous scholarship illuminated by the acute ear of one of our finest poets and the argumentative abilities of one of the most subtle of critics.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“A remarkable little book . . . meticulously researched and brilliantly written. . . . Hill has not only made a valuable contribution to literary history but has also provided us with a rich and thoughtful commentary on problems as enduring as they are currently fashionable.”—Cleanth Brooks, The New Criterion
“This is an important book of literary criticism and theory by the finest British poet of our time. It engages a number of fascinating questions, including language and belief; the sometimes warring concerns of poets, intellectuals, and scholars; of self-realized imagination and institutionalized knowledge; and poetic work and literary career. That Hill is so very powerful, original, and profound a poet is of considerable importance for this exploration of what for poets is frequently ‘the enemy’s country’ governed by institutional power, whether directly political, literary, academic, or that of intellectual, or at least discursive, fashion.”—John Hollander, Yale University
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“He is the most powerful living poet.”—New Republic
“The interest of these essays as part of the Hill oeuvre should not obscure their value as a contribution to seventeenth-century literary studies. They represent an exacting and meticulous scholarship illuminated by the acute ear of one of our finest poets and the argumentative abilities of one of the most subtle of critics.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“The interest of these essays as part of the Hill oeuvre should not obscure their value as a contribution to seventeenth-century literary studies. They represent an exacting and meticulous scholarship illuminated by the acute ear of one of our finest poets and the argumentative abilities of one of the most subtle of critics.”—The Times Literary Supplement
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dense but brilliant book of criticism by a great poet,
This review is from: The Enemy's Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (Hardcover)
The Enemy's Country is Hill's second book of criticism, collected from lectures he gave at Cambridge University. Each essay takes on a different topic, ranging from Dryden, Walton and Donne to Ezra Pound. Yet they all fit together in complex ways. The overall theme is the poet's need to operate within the 'contextures' of language and society. The poet should not give way to 'compleasance', yet he must realize the dangers and cannot simply pretend to operate his art from a non-topos, or utopia. He is very much within the world around him, and so is his art. Only the artist who realizes this can struggle against it - his language becomes his resistance.Hill has given more to the English language than any other 20th century poet, and this volume of criticism only continues that. His prose is almost as dense as his poetry; it makes very hard reading for the uninitiated, but (as with his poetry) over time it yields its secrets and proves very deep and provocative. For those interested in 16th and 17th century literature in English, this book is indispensible, but even for others, there is much to learn here from a master.
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