Collected Critical Writings - Tapa dura

their incisiveness, moral passions and originality constitute a formidable lesson. They are a constant counterpoint to the genius of the poet. (George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year)

the strongest pieces, especially from his first volume of essays, The Lords of Limit, yield nothing to Trilling in moral seriousness or to Auden in verbal scrupulousness. (Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year)

[an] imposing, rewarding book. (David-Antoine Williams, Times Higher Education)

[a] monumental volume... takes the reader on a soaring trip through the greats of classical and modern English literature... the moral dignity and scholarly authority Hill brings to his subjects is quite simply breath-taking at times (Gerald Dawe, Irish Times)

[A] wonderfully varied collection of essays. It is not just that it is a breadth of interests hardly parallelled by any contemporary critic. One has a sense of a powerful intellectual and spritual centre, an inner coherence, a philosophy that grows out of a continuously intelligent engagement with the culture. (John Casey, The Tablet)

Everything in Hill's style - all one values in it - relates to its visionary purpose. (Alastair Fowler)

Only a highly intelligent and well-informed person could have produced such a collection. (A.O.J. Cockshut, Church Times)

Geoffrey Hill is the central poet-prophet of our augmenting darkness, and inherits the authority of visionaries from Dante and Blake on to D. H. Lawrence. (Harold Bloom)

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 whom A. N. Wilson has called 'probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose'. 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.