Geoffrey Hill’s ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis: his adumbration of an exemplary poetics offers illuminating new perspectives on this tension. The concept of exemplarity is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity. An example can be defined both by its effect on its followers and by its inherent qualities: a poem can be ‘exemplary’ by virtue of its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become an especially significant dimension in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work in the present) an increasingly revealing element in his writing.
Geoffrey Hill’s ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis: his adumbration of an exemplary poetics offers illuminating new perspectives on this tension. The concept of exemplarity is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity. An example can be defined both by its effect on its followers and by its inherent qualities: a poem can be ‘exemplary’ by virtue of its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become an especially significant dimension in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work in the present) an increasingly revealing element in his writing.
Uploads
Papers by Bridget Vincent
Geoffrey Hill’s ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis: his adumbration of an exemplary poetics offers illuminating new perspectives on this tension. The concept of exemplarity is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity. An example can be defined both by its effect on its followers and by its inherent qualities: a poem can be ‘exemplary’ by virtue of its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become an especially significant dimension in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work in the present) an increasingly revealing element in his writing.
Geoffrey Hill’s ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis: his adumbration of an exemplary poetics offers illuminating new perspectives on this tension. The concept of exemplarity is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity. An example can be defined both by its effect on its followers and by its inherent qualities: a poem can be ‘exemplary’ by virtue of its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become an especially significant dimension in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work in the present) an increasingly revealing element in his writing.