Awakening The Memory Of The Other

The contemporary British poet Geoffrey Hill is one of the prominant poets in the field of post-war British poetry. In his more-than-sixty-year literary career, he has been persistently "digging" into Western history. Most of his works are either meditations on specific historical events or elegies to specific historical figures. We name this quality of his poetry as Hill’s motif of memory (history). This thesis focuses on Hill’s poetic ideas reflected by his strong sense of history.From the perspective of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s idea of non-identification, this thesis analysizes Hill’s motif of memory (history). This thesis points out that Hill’s view about and ways of solving modern man’s numbing are identical with these thinkers’views. Reification is a variation of instrumental reason’s identification. In the commercial society, instrumental reason the predominant self manifests itself in the form of exchange value, which has reified social relations, human mind, human sensibility as well as humanity. All those which do not fit into the rationality of reification have been excluded and reduced to the other. Recuperating the self s sensibility to the Other through artistic ways is the non-identification thinkers’ as well as Hill’s way of recuperating human sensibility and restoring humanity.This thesis delves into three aspects of Hill’s motif of memory (history):the motivation of Hill’s memory (history) motif, his artistic ways of recalling the Other and the content of the Other’s alterity retained in his poetry. The first chapter mainly analyzes the reason behind Hill’s memory (history) motif and his investigation into the root of this problem. The reason of Hill’s fascination with history and the dead is that he has perceived a major modern cultural malaise, cultural amnesia. In addition, Hill examines one of the manifestations as well as the reasons of cultural amnesia, the split between the word and the thing. Moreover, Hill probes into the root of cultural amnesia, the reification or identification of language, which is a manifestation of the reified human mind. The reified language and the reified mind are interrelated; the former is a manifestation of the latter, while the latter accelerate the process of the former.The second chapter first probes into Hill’s poetic idea of recuperating human sensibility, then analyzes three poetic devices nurtured by the idea. As Hill suggests, "shocks of recognition" is the basic character of good poetry. By recuperating the readers’ wholesome sensibility which is a combination of emotion and rationality, poetry can help the reader perceive the Others, which are marginalized by the reifying culture. This is a way to approach the truth of life and that of history. Hill’s idea of shocks of recognition is in essence identical with the idea of sublime proposed by the above mentioned non-identification thinkers.The third chapter delves into the human values which have been alienated by the material culture but retained in Hill’s poetry. Hill’s effort to retain these values is driven by his idea of intrinsic value. These values are alienated by the material culture but beneficial to the welfare of the individual as well as human society as a whole. They are the realization of the good in humanity. In addition, Hill investigates into "illth", the opposite part of intrinsic value, which would do detriment to the individual or a community’s healthy development and incur disasters to human beings.All in all, Hill’s motif of memory (history) is nurtured by his insight into the side effects of the reifing culture:it reifies human mind, incurs numbing as well as cultural amnesia, and alienates humanity. He then resorts to poetry’s power to save the reified human nature. He tries to restore human sensibility by the art of poetry and retains in his poetry the western especially British tradition of humanism, which he deems as the way of breaking the fetters of reifying culture and restoring the wholesome humanity. These qualities of Hill’s poetry reflect his insight into the numbing and alienating effects of the cultural hegemony of the commercial society. In addition, they also embody Hill’s poetic endeavor to resist the identifying and dehumanizing process of modern material culture by resorting to the art of poetry.