Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry

This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.

Jewish Humanism in the Late Work of Geoffrey Hill

Throughout much of his career, Geoffrey Hill has been pilloried for his alleged conservativism as well as his positive treatment of Christianity in his poetry. A careful reading of his works, however, reveals a complex thinker who was attentive to the moral fallout of the Holocaust and the Second World War as he was a lover of England and European culture. Moreover, Hill’s writings reflect the apparent influence of a host of personalist, existentialist and what could also be called “humanist” twentieth century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Throughout his poetry—especially his later work—Hill attempts (whether successfully or not) to fuse together this Jewish humanism with his own Christian and English voice.

The Alvarez Generation

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.

Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry

This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression, and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring.