The academic vocation in Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne

The following thesis is a study of Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne in the context of the university. It argues that various institutional academic commitments – such as to scholarship, teaching, and administration – bear directly on both Hill’s and Prynne’s practices as poets and as critics. The thesis draws upon an extensive record of each poet’s academic career in the Geoffrey Hill Archive at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and the J. H. Prynne Papers at the Cambridge University Library. The first chapter reflects on the composition of Hill’s 1968 collection, King Log, in a set of notebooks embossed with the crest of the University of Leeds. With close reference to the manuscript drafts of a particular sequence in that collection, ‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz’, the chapter reads Hill’s extensive revisions of a crucial simile – ‘Like a disciplined scholar’ – in the context of a lifelong equivocation over the terms of his professional self-description. The second chapter turns over a series of loose index cards on which Hill had prepared a set of speaking notes concerning his sense of academic specialisation as a philologist. Tracing this developing sense of specialisation throughout Hill’s writings, the chapter discovers in William Empson’s 1951 book, The Structure of Complex Words, a little-remarked influence not only on Hill’s philological thought but on his more general sense of a literary academic vocation. The third chapter of the thesis concerns Hill and Prynne’s time as colleagues in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, and especially their co-operation as examination markers in the academic year 1981-2. With reference to unpublished correspondence, this chapter reads the two poets’ conflict over a menial task of academic administration in the broader context of their poetic and pedagogical thinking. The fourth chapter looks at Prynne’s teaching of the Practical Criticism course at Cambridge in the 1960s, in order to better understand his sense of pedagogical responsibility, both to students and to readers of his poetry. With close reference to exercise handouts he devised for undergraduates, it considers Prynne’s formulation of academic questions in light of his poetic project at the time, in which themes of learning, close reading, and educational marketisation figure prominently. The fifth and final chapter of the thesis turns to Prynne’s engagement with the literary pastoral mode as a complex analogy for academic labour, whereby regions of specialised or disciplinary knowledge are implicitly compared with the enclosure and cultivation of common land. In doing so, it returns to Empson’s influence, whose ‘philosophical’ notion of pastoral can be seen to inspire Prynne’s expansive sense of his own intellectual ‘field’ of study.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• McCallum, Gabriel George Rolfe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Thaventhiran, Helen

• Critical University Studies
• Geoffrey Hill
• J. H. Prynne
• Late modernism
• Practical Criticism

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6af8d1d0-c814-4f6f-a6f7-9420488ab2ca/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.126649

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/397543