Geoffrey Hill Zinger: Missing the puns

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Missing the puns

In Kirsch's chapter on Geoffrey Hill in The Modern Element: essays on Contemporary Poetry (2008), Langdon Hammer's point about puns (see below) is indeed clearly demonstrated. Kirsch's reading of "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings" refrains from commenting on a key repetition of the poem, "They lie; they lie" which underscores the intended pun. Kirsch's interpretation seems deliberately first-degree, and avoids addressing the political commitment of the poem, probably because he does not find it to his liking.

International Conferences & Seminars

2008 Keble College, Oxford, "Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts"

2008 Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, "British Poetry 1950-2008 and the Public/Private Divide"

2008 Université de Caen, "Selected Poems from Modernism to Now"

2007 University of Warwick, "Poets Reading Philosophy, Philosophers Reading Poetry"

2005 University of London (ESSE 8), "British & European: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill"

2003 Université de Caen, "La Poésie de Geoffrey Hill et la modernité"

2002 Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII, "Collage, Montage, Assemblage: Poésie Anglophone"

2001 University of Warwick, "Tradition and Translation: The Work of Geoffrey Hill"