Publication of the week: Professor Stefan Hawlin

Hawlin, S., “The Redemption of History: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power”, Literary Imagination  (2014). doi: 10.1093/litimag/imu010.

Geoffrey Hill receives Honorary Doctorate at Oxford University, photo courtesy of Darrell Godliman

A Treatise of Civil Power, Hill’s 2007 poetry collection named after Milton’s political tract of 1659, meditates on the relations between art, politics and history. As James Hellings says, “Art renews the imperative to think differently, think again, and imagine a different world”; Hill affirms a similar view, but less optimistically, ranging across time and place.

This essay explores the deeper thinking underlying Hill’s volume, as he imagines himself into a range of historical situations. We inhabit the world of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, for instance, the inventor of blank verse in the 1540s, his art in part conditioned by, and in part a response to, the tyranny of Henry VIII, that ‘cleaver of women and old holy men’. Elsewhere in the volume, we see other stresses between art and history: Milton’s engagement with the struggles of the Civil War period, and Blake’s long opposition to the war with France and the repressive governments of 1793 onwards. What was it like, Hill wonders, to be Ernst Balach, a sculptor of such nuance and integrity, having his art labelled “degenerate” by the Nazis? The final moving image here is of Olivier Messiaen composing one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century, Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1940), while a prisoner-of-war in freezing Stalag VIII-A. The dissonances and harmonies of that quartet created (in Hill’s words) ‘irregular beauties contra the New Order’. In these and other explorations, Hill has developed a sequence of illuminating and challenging poems.

Literary Imagination is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Subscribers can access the article on the OUP journals website, under ‘Advance Access’, at http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/