A lecture by Kenneth Haynes
The poet Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) was often drawn to violent, highly-charged, and morally ambivalent moments in the history of Britain, Europe, and America. His verse is renowned for its scrupulous and disciplined responses to those moments. It is therefore unexpected that he was also attracted to a very different rhetorical tradition, that of rant, a mode of speaking offering itself as angry, uncontrollable utterances. It attempts to shock audiences about a state of affairs that is understood as blindingly obvious. It is partial to special jargons of hatred and seeks to recruit disciples. As an authorial display of uncontrol, it requires the evidence of an agitated persona for its force. It seems to be hardly literary at all because (unlike, say, the lucid anger of Swift or creatively inventive rage in Shakespeare) it tends to be reductive, repetitive, strident, and heavy-handed.
How should this be understood? One approach is to see rant as particularly apt in circumstances when no adequate language or theorization is available within an oppressive state of affairs. These circumstances have historically included the populist and pseudo-populist responses to financial crises and collapse, and in English and American literature a distinctive tradition of public rhetoric emerged alongside these crises. With Geoffrey Hill as a guide, the talk will trace this tradition from William Cobbett to Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Ezra Pound, concluding with Hill’s own ambivalent attraction to and repulsion by it.
Kenneth Haynes is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, Providence RI
This lecture has been organised by Michael Griffiths, and is sponsored by Michael and his wife Alessandra. The seminal British poet Geoffrey Hill came to read his poetry in the Library in 2007, which led to the writing of a poem "Al Tempo d'e Tremuoti" which he dedicated to Michael and Alessandra. That poem was a fine reflection on Hill's life's work, with some moving verses on his time in Florence, including visits with Michael and Alessandra to Machiavelli's house, the Medici tombs and Donatello's sculptures in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.
For this last Wednesday Lecture in the current season we are pleased to invite everyone to attend free of charge!
If you are in Florence and would like to attend the lecture in person at the British Institute Library, please send an email to bif@britishinstitute.it
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