TURNING, AT/TUNING, ATONING: GEOFFREY HILL AND THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE

Abstract

Turn, return, verse, reverse, converse, convert, retort — there is no shortage of turns in Hill’s poetry. His essay ‘The Tartar’s Bow and the Bow of Ulysses’ (1991) illuminates this critical and poetical interest in a sustained analysis of Francis Bacon’s metaphor wherein he likens the resistances of language to the ‘recoil’ of a reflex bow. Hill’s retort — indeed a turn — offers a counter-metaphor of the musician’s bow, suggesting that resistance is, in fact, the sine qua non of expression, and that which gives it its force. This thesis makes a case for the ‘turn’ as the crucial point around which Hill’s poetics of resistance crystallise, and argues that its resonances/overtones in tuning, attuning, and atoning constitute a cyclic structure around which his poetry is composed. Chapter 1 examines the struggle of the poetic voice against the weight of Fall and the rectifying inward turn required to resist it, and further considers the way in which the turn found in active self-correction is a means of mastering language’s ‘recoil’. Chapter 2 then turns to self-recursivity as a means of re-apprehending the self, and argues that recurving is indeed a kind of crucible from which grace or that which is beyond the self might be produced. Finally, Chapter 3 considers the value of counterpoint, namely the poet’s engagement with voices beyond himself and dissonance as a necessary resistance not only to strengthen one’s voice, but to hear others justly, and thus create harmony.