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CHARLES I. ARMSTRONG
University of Bergen
Abstract
This article
addresses poetry’s purported status of being a particularly
immediate utterance, through a close reading of Geoffrey
Hill’s poem “Elegiac Stanzas: On a Visit to Dove Cottage.”
Although Hill is suspicious of the contemporary
understanding of Romanticism, he both critically and
poetically has sought to unearth a living and important
legacy related to this movement. His “Elegiac Stanzas”
engage in a complicated interaction with both William
Wordsworth’s own precedent and the present appropriation of
Romanticism. Hill’s poem remembers Wordsworth and his
precedent – including a poem such as “Elegiac Stanzas,
Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle,” but also touching
upon figures such as Hopkins and Milton – while also
questioning the very processes underlying remembrance and
literary tradition. It pits commemoration against
commodification, staunchly insisting that a true poetic
legacy constitutes something radically alien to the kind of
touristic enjoyment proffered by the National Trust. On the
other hand, though, Hill’s own poetic idiom is sufficiently
conscientious to question the possibility of upholding such
binary oppositions. This reading extricates the manifold
layers of meaning and irony that make “Elegiac Stanzas” a
particularly complex meditation on the vulnerabilities and
vicissitudes of poetic memory.
Keywords:
Poetry, ethics, Romanticism, memory, tradition, allusion,
mediation, place, tourism, complexity
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