| Abstract
|
:
|
This essay is essentially an analysis of Geoffrey Hill’s long and difficult poem of 1983, “The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,” a poem that confronts the advent of modernity and the ambiguities of history by focusing on the dilemmas that the French poet and journalist named in its title faced on the eve of World War 1. Hill sees Péguy as embracing a version of Christian fatalism, and so too his own attitude toward history is deeply fatalistic in the poem. If there is a saving grace for Hill, it is not in history, which remains forever unresolved, but in poetry. This essay is essentially an analysis of Geoffrey Hill’s long and difficult poem of 1983, “The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,” a poem that confronts the advent of modernity and the ambiguities of history by focusing on the dilemmas that the French poet and journalist named in its title faced on the eve of World War 1. Hill sees Péguy as embracing a version of Christian fatalism, and so too his own attitude toward history is deeply fatalistic in the poem. If there is a saving grace for Hill, it is not in history, which remains forever unresolved, but in poetry.
|