‘The Changed Measures of Light’: Post-Romanticism and Geoffrey Hill's Difficult Revelations

O'Neill, Michael

doi:10.3366/rom.2016.0294

‘The Changed Measures of Light’: Post-Romanticism and Geoffrey Hill's Difficult Revelations

O'Neill, Michael

Authors

Michael O'Neill

Abstract

It is this essay's working hypothesis that, for the contemporary poet, Romanticism amounts to more than a set of possibilities from which the poet strolling round the thematic and prosodic shopping mall can select, before nipping off to the Renaissance palazzo or Modernist speakeasy. It is more like an ineluctable predicament, like a genetic make-up, or wave after wave of after-shock. Geoffrey Hill is a poet whose influences and allusions cover a prodigious range of authors and languages, but they operate in the radiant shadow of Romantic poetry and culture. For Hill, a key aspect of the Romantic bequest is the guilt indistinguishable from writing poetry, a guilt paradoxically expiable only in poetry. Hill is post-Romantic in the way in which he positions himself amidst the ruins of tradition, nowhere more so than in his dealings with light, both a property of poems by dead poets and a perpetually tantalising gift to the living.

Citation

O'Neill, M. (2016). ‘The Changed Measures of Light’: Post-Romanticism and Geoffrey Hill's Difficult Revelations. Romanticism, 22(3), 331-340. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0294

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jan 1, 2016
Online Publication Date	Sep 15, 2016
Publication Date	Oct 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Nov 14, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Dec 12, 2016
Journal	Romanticism
Print ISSN	1354-991X
Electronic ISSN	1750-0192
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	22
Issue	3
Pages	331-340
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0294