Riding Westward: Geoffrey Hill's Eccentric Resistances

Monday 2 March 2015, 5.30PM to 6.30pm

A Centre for Modern Studies postgraduate forum seminar

Karl O'Hanlon: The Volcano and the Dove: Disquisitions on Grace in Geoffrey Hill and Others
Stephen Grace: ‘broken in time’: Geoffrey Hill’s Multidirectional Sonnet

'Law-breaking too is in the hierarchy

and riding westward, post-haste.

This brings us to Michaelmas, its rule and riot,

its light a fading nimbus over Wales.'

from Scenes from Comus, in Broken Hierarchies (p. 431)

Geoffrey Hill's poetry has sometimes been read as being complicit with a deeply-suspicious nostalgia, both nationalistic and religiously orthodox in tenor. The papers in this panel argue that, like John Donne's famous poem of 1613, Hill's poems 'ride westward', eccentrically rupturing or challenging the hierarchies and orthodoxies he is purported to proclaim.

Location: BS/008, Berrick Saul Building