In his essay, Language, Suffering, and Silence (Geoffrey Hill: - TopicsExpress



          

In his essay, Language, Suffering, and Silence (Geoffrey Hill: Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes), Geoffrey Hill gives a shout out to Whitman. He gives a few examples of poets (Matthew Arnold, Auden, Milosz) hectoring and [being] self-congratulatory as they view suffering. Then he cites Sections 33-6 of Song of Myself, those verse-paragraphs of the shipwreck, the Alamo, the fight of the Bonhomme Richard, to consider how Whitman, far from excluding generality and commonality by the sharply particular, intensifies it by such means, making the extremity a revelation of human suffering and of an endurance both exceptional and to be expected of humankind in its great diversity of natures and capacities (p. 403). Wow! I think Ill reading Sections 33-6 tonight!
Posted on: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 02:17:24 +0000

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