Collected Critical Writings
Contributors: Kenneth Haynes (Editor)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: March 30, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 688
ISBN-13: 9780199208470
Subjects: Poetry & poets; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; British Isles; Ancient and Classical; Literary Criticism & Collections / Ancient & Classical; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Poetry; American poetry; Christian literature, English; English poetry; History and criticism
Description: "The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty years of Hill's published criticism, in a revised final form, and also adds much new work. It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic. In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F.H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context - political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's 'The Night', his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary. Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in 'Our Word is Our Bond', 'Language, Suffering, and Value', and 'Poetry and Value'. In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence."--Jacket.