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Article: A colder spell to come.('Scenes from Comus', 'Without Title')(Book review)
- Article from:
- Poetry
- Article date:
- May 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Modern Poetry Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Without Title, by Geoffrey Hill. Penguin Books. 9.99 [pounds sterling].
Scenes From Comus, by Geoffrey Hill. Penguin Books. 9.99 [pounds sterling].
The sense of language as guilt--the sense that words accrue faults, and even seemingly innocent utterances trail remote incriminating meanings the way a bird trails its shadow on the ground--is a heavy presence in twentieth-century poetry, and nowhere heavier than in the work of Geoffrey Hill. That language abets acts of oppression and violence, even incorporates them in its elemental structure; that rhetoric is always, so to speak, coolly stacking the deck: these are charges frequently brought by writers on ...