Transaction and Transcendence: Geoffrey Hill’s Vision of Canaan
Rachel Buxton is Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University, and author of the recent monograph Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (OUP 2004).
Geoffrey Hill’s Canaan (1996) is a volume caught between the contradictory demands of transaction and transcendence: central to its vision is the difficulty of rethinking history as poetry, of forging links between political and aesthetic discourses. The poems and sequences discussed – ‘Pisgah’, ‘Churchill’s Funeral’, and ‘De Jure Belli Ac Pacis’ – reveal the pressures under which the genre of the lyric, and language more generally, has been placed, torn as it is between these competing impulses.