Stephen James, ‘"A Conflict of Opposites": Robert Lowell and Geoffrey Hill'. Symbiosis, 10.1 (April 2006) 63-86.

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 10.1.

Essay Topics and Keywords:

Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle and Imitations, Hill's For the Unfallen, Mercian Hymns, A Treatise of Civil Power'

An extract from this essay:

In Hill’s poetry, as in the early verse of Lowell, the exertions and strains of expression testify to the severity of the struggle. They are manifested in certain shared characteristics: an effortful, compacted form of utterance, an anguished magniloquence, a baroque linguistic violence, a concentration on states of spiritual despair, and a ready capacity for moral affront. Both rhythmically and conceptually, the early poems of Lowell and Hill are, to borrow a phrase from ‘God’s Little Mountain’, ‘pent up into a region of pure force’.

Stephen James

University of Bristol