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The Enemy's Country - Words, Contexture, and other Circumstances of Language (Hardcover)
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The Enemy's Country - Words, Contexture, and other Circumstances of Language (Hardcover)
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Geoffrey Hill is University Professor at Boston University. He
holds an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Leeds and is an
Honorary Fellow of both Keble College, Oxford and Emmanuel College,
Cambridge. Amongst many other recognitions of his work as a poet,
he has received the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Award. He
gave the Clark Lectures, on which this book is based, in 1986.
`Well done!' is a familiar cry with a complex sense. It may applaud
the merest knack, patronize a decent competence, or squarely
recognize something at once finely-achieved and morally just. The
language of true valuing is constantly shadowed by parodies of
itself - sales-talk, sociable politeness, or gush. The Enemy's
Country is concerned with the ways in which judgement is conveyed
through language, and with the difficulty of clearing the terms of
judgement not from but for the pressures of circumstance so that
what is said may be fitting. Poetry has sometimes been credited
with a special place as a form of conduct in language, as if it
were a world of words of its own from which the poet masterfully
dispenses a distinctly free speech. These essays enquire whether
such high praises, even when sincere, are apt to the real
conditions of poets' work, to their share of drudgery, their fears
of misapprehension or their need to please, to the entanglements of
meaning in historical communities. The 'sheer perfection' of lyric
utterance is shown to involve a recognition and acceptance of the
poet's place in `the scheme of things', a scheme of business and
accommodation which is not ideally clean but which remains a ground
of the art's refinement. Dryden is at the centre of the book.
Around his exemplary figure, Geoffrey Hill describes with biting
erudition and minutely sympathetic imagination the perplexities and
felicity of genius in writers such as Donne, Hobbes, and Marvell.
The book closes with a study of Pound's `Envoi:1919' in which Hill,
characteristically, brings together humour, scrupulousness, and
enquiring commitment to the hopes of poetry. The Enemy's Country
enacts `virtue's struggle to clear and maintain its own meaning
amid the commonplace approximation, the common practice of men'.
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