All true, Dom. Also, you just know that a critic who can write, "Hill taxes
the reader to buy a good library, or — in these fallen days — sail the
traitorous Internet between the lies of Scylla and the damned lies of
Charybdis. A reader must want to thumb through dusty pages, or dustier Web
pages..." is full of shit.
jd
On Jan 20, 2008 3:42 PM, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to
> him"
>
> This is quite significantly false. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of
> the earlier Clutag "Treatise of Civil Power" - now that I'm not trying
> to build an academic career by driving my horse and my cart over the
> bones of Hill's oeuvre, I'm not quite the completist I once was. I do
> have the Penguin volume, however,which I think is very good and which
> says a few things about honouring the intelligence of "the common
> reader" (whom Hill in a recent radio interview referred to as "a
> natural aristocrat of the spirit", cribbing I think from Lawrence)
> that I wonder at Logan's simply ignoring in this fashion.
>
> There are two things Hill's current critics habitually do that I find
> particularly tiresome. One is moral exhibitionism, exhorting the
> reader to imitate the critic's efforts at decoding, say, _Speech!
> Speech!_ as if so doing might somehow make you a better person (like,
> e.g., your humble critic). The other is making a big fuss about the
> obscurity of his references, the normal method being to pick a couple
> of especially obscure ones and explicate them just to make the point
> about how terribly erudite and perspicacious one needs to be to handle
> this stuff (so unless you're as clever as me, dear reader, you might
> as well not bother). I simply don't think that's true; I think Hill's
> verse does most of its real work at some distance from its points of
> departure, and tracing the path back to the latter is an optional
> exercise: it depends on whether the poem itself makes you curious
> about its field of reference, and sucks you in. Reading Hill's poems
> has at times prompted me to investigate all sorts of recondite areas,
> and that has been one of the pleasures of them, but they are
> emphatically not calling for some sort of ideal reader who has read
> everything Hill has read and thought everything he has thought about
> it.
>
> Dominic
>
--
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
[sharpsand.net]
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