Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill - Hardcover

by Bridget Vincent (Author)

How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers--including recent underexplored
posthumous works.

In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

Author Biography

Bridget Vincent, Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, University of Nottingham

Bridget Vincent is an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry at the University of Nottingham. After completing a PhD at Cambridge University as a General Sir John Monash Scholar, she taught at Selwyn College and Magdalene College. She then held a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research
Fellowship at the University of Melbourne and a Postdoctoral Research Associateship at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her research lies in the field of twentieth-century British and Irish literature, with particular emphases on poetics, modernism, and the civic role of writing. She has
published on modern poetry in the Modern Language Review, Philosophy and Literature, Diogenes and the MLR Yearbook of English Studies. She was recently awarded a British Academy Rising Star grant for a project on writing and attention, which considers the role of literature in the age of digital
distraction and misinformation.