Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill
Abstract
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 plays an important role in these poets’ key preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to influence to memorialization, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this analysis of critical prose, drama, and archival materials as well as poetry, this book offers a groundbreaking study of ethics in the later writings of these two poets, including recent and 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. So far, the ethical criticism of fiction has largely been 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.