Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008
On the Edge
By Al Alvarez
A Treatise of Civil Power
by Geoffrey Hill
Yale University Press, 51 pp., $30.00; $16.00 (paper)
Civil power is a strange choice of subject for a poet like Geoffrey Hill, who started writing in the early 1950s, the age of anxiety, a notoriously bad time for civil liberties and a good time for literature. Or more accurately, the times were good for literature because they were bad for civil liberties. With the cold war at its coldest and Senator McCarthy on the prowl in the United States, politics was a topic to avoid—tricky and prone to misinterpretation—and intellectuals generally were not to be trusted. In England, where the climate is milder and demagogues, like political passions, rarely thrive, the anxiety was no less but it came disguised as reticence, parochialism, and snobbery.
Review, 3485 words
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