Collected Critical Writings

Reviews / Votes

their incisiveness, moral passions and originality constitute a formidable lesson. They are a constant counterpoint to the genius of the poet. George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year the strongest pieces, especially from his first volume of essays, The Lords of Limit, yield nothing to Trilling in moral seriousness or to Auden in verbal scrupulousness. Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year [an] imposing, rewarding book. David-Antoine Williams, Times Higher Education [a] monumental volume... takes the reader on a soaring trip through the greats of classical and modern English literature... the moral dignity and scholarly authority Hill brings to his subjects is quite simply breath-taking at times Gerald Dawe, Irish Times [A] wonderfully varied collection of essays. It is not just that it is a breadth of interests hardly parallelled by any contemporary critic. One has a sense of a powerful intellectual and spritual centre, an inner coherence, a philosophy that grows out of a continuously intelligent engagement with the culture. John Casey, The Tablet Everything in Hill's style - all one values in it - relates to its visionary purpose. Alastair Fowler Only a highly intelligent and well-informed person could have produced such a collection. A.O.J. Cockshut, Church Times Geoffrey Hill is the central poet-prophet of our augmenting darkness, and inherits the authority of visionaries from Dante and Blake on to D. H. Lawrence. Harold Bloom