Dominic Fox's points about Bunting & Hill are fascinating. I like Hill,
most especially for Mercian Hymns, but am much more taken by all of Bunting
than all of Hill, & consider Briggflatts to be one of the major British
poems of the century. Bunting actually worked for Pound, studied with him,
so to speak, & would see himself as a modernist writer in what is now
called the Pound tradition, I think, although with his own, very
specifically british bias. I can see Hill as taking on aspects of that
tradition, but his religiosity in many poems seems to undercut it, & I
think Dominic's take on Hill's "An Apology For The Revival Of Christian
Architecture In
England" -- 'that queer and only occasionally lovely meditation on the
etiolation of the national mythos. ("Queer" because it's so difficult to
distinguish the poems' warping-of-nostalgia from the poems'
warped-nostalgia)' -- brilliantly catches some of the problems of Hill's
other poetry.
For me, for rereading for deep pleasure, it's Bunting, much more than Hill.
I wonder if that might be partly a North American thing...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Springtime's wide
water-
yield
but the field
will return
Lorine Niedecker
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