Style And Faith

Description

Seven masterly essays on those inspired writings, both sacred and secular, in which things inaccessible are made suddenly accessible, and diction and desire are miraculously at one. In this, his first collection of essays in more than a decade, Geoffrey Hill again returns to "the Enemy's country," that fallen world where both scholarship and ignorance lie in ambush of Truth, to rescue inspired literature from misreading. His texts include the Oxford English Dictionary, Tyndale's Bible , and poems by Henry Vaughan and T. S. Eliot, as well the vast apparatus of opinion about them. Style and Faith --seven essays in the moral life of literature and the moral burden of the poet--will interest anyone who values precision and concision, and literary criticism in the service of the commonweal.

Geoffrey Hill was born in 1932, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. A graduate of Keble College, Oxford, he taught for many years at the University of Leeds and then lectured at Cambridge as a fellow of Emmanuel College. He is the author of 9 books of poetry (including Counterpoint's Speech! Speech! (2000) and The Orchards of Syon (2002)) and New & Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Since 1988 he has taught at Boston University, where he is currently Professor of Literature & Religion and co-director of the Editorial Institute.

"[Hill's essays] are among the most painstaking brilliant analyses of literature in our century, and have expanded on his poetry's concerns for the guilts and guiles of language and the moral recognitions of the word." "Geoffrey Hill is probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose."