ABSTRACT

In his early criticism, Geoffrey Hill conceives of the work of poetry as a process of strenuous revision towards a definable point of ‘technical perfecti[on]’, identifying the poet’s ethical engagement in the end-directed ‘act of self-critical decision’. The early poetry, contrastingly, expresses a distrust of the poem as finished product which is often manifest in a poetics of stone: a finished poem petrifies that which it attempts to remember. Employing a genetic methodology, this article tests whether these two conflicting attitudes might produce a friction that affects how the poems develop. It finds that the poems are animated by the question of how, ethically, to finish a poem and traces the vicissitudes of that animation in their developing deployment of stone imagery. Finally, it addresses the customary critical division between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Hill, arguing – through extended close attention to the notebook drafts of The Triumph of Love (1998) – that a dramatic shift in Hill’s revisionary ethic catalyses a profound poetic change expressed in a reconception of stone as flux. Hill’s new, late poetic seeks to comprise itself of its own revisionary processes, thus to remain perpetually in process and, in its unfinishedness, to manifest an ethical openness to alterity.

摘要

在他早期的批评中，杰弗里·希尔将诗歌作品设想为一个对“技术完善”的可定义点进行艰苦修正的过程，确定了诗人在最终导向的“自我批评决定行为”中的道德参与. 相比之下，早期的诗歌表达了对诗歌作为成品的不信任，这通常表现在石头诗学中：一首完成的诗将它试图记住的东西石化了。本文采用遗传方法，测试这两种相互冲突的态度是否会产生影响诗歌发展的摩擦。它发现这些诗歌被如何在道德上完成一首诗的问题所激发，并在他们发展石头意象的部署中追溯了该动画的变迁。最后，The Triumph of Love (1998)——希尔修正伦理的戏剧性转变催化了深刻的诗意变化，重新将石头视为流动的概念。希尔的新的、晚期的诗意试图将自己包含在它自己的修正过程中，从而永远保持在过程中，并在其未完成的情况下，表现出对异性的伦理开放。