Friday 29 May 2020

Geoffrey Hill Explained

Many readers find Geoffrey Hill's poetry difficult. Well, fear not – here is Harold Bloom, in his Introduction to Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952-1971, to explain. The key to Hill's poetry, he declares, is 'metaleptical reversal or transumption, the dominant trope of post-Romantic poetry in English ... Transumption is the trope of a trope, or technically the metonymy of a metonymy. That is, it tends to be a figure that substitutes an aspect of a previous figure for that figure. Imagistically, transumption from Milton through the Romantics to the present tends to manifest itself in terms of earliness substituting for lateness, and more often than not to be the figure that concludes poems. Translated into psychoanalytic terms, transumption is either the psychic defence of introjection (identification) or of projection (refusal of identity), just as metaphor translates into the defence of sublimation, or hyperbole into that of repression. The advantage of transumption as a concluding trope for belated poems is that it achieves a kind of fresh priority or earliness, but always at the expense of the presentness of the present or living moment.'
Got that? Me neither.

7 comments:

  1. Back in 1990, one started to see bumper stickers reading "We Support our Military Troops". Perhaps one could make a good thing, at least in college towns, of bumper stickers reading "We Support our Literary Tropes".

    I wonder why Hill gave his blessing to the introduction. Suggesting that Bloom held some of his family hostage would count as hyperbole, though, and I'm not here to defend repression.

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  2. Ho ho – who knows? To be fair, the rest of the Intro isn't bad. I think Bloom put that in to draw readers' attention to the 'full analysis of the trope' in his page-turner A Map of Misreading (me neither).

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  3. Reminds me of the sociologist, who went to a strip-club and watched the audience....

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  4. I am not embarrassed to say I understand it perfectly. Bloom is talking about how poets present the personality of the Ideal Man. Later poets try to redefine the "figure" of man previous poets depict as Lucifer, Prometheus, Urizen, Albion, Alastor, Don Juan and so on.

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  5. The Fool of the Tarot is the Trope on which every Persona in every great poem is based, the man who is hurled from Heaven and then goes on his quest to redefine himself on his own terms, and either tragically fails or romantically succeeds.

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