European Voices in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill

«The duty of the present is neither to copy nor to deny the past but to resurrect it», wrote W.H. Auden in 1948. The European voices that William B. Yeats and Sir Geoffrey Hill choose to resurrect reflect their shared hope in the future of humanity, as the essays in this book demonstrate. From Greek and Roman voices, through the Italian Renaissance and into our troubled present, these poets use myth, as Auden suggested, «to make private experiences public» and «public events personal». They write about the past to maintain continuity and provide the transmission of cultural values or to avoid the repetition of atrocities. As visionary poets, their talents at reviving the poetic voice captivate and inspire. The essays in this volume elucidate both their poetic vision and resistance.
The chapters in this book derive from an international conference on Yeats and Hill that took place at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2013. They are preceded by abstracts and a general introduction in French.

The authors of the chapters in this volume live in America, Asia, and Europe. Specialists of modernist, classical, or contemporary poetry, several are well-known poets. The editors teach literature at the Catholic University of Paris and are specialists of Modernism.
Ineke Bockting, head of the English Department and the research group of the Faculties of Letters and Education, is the author of a critical study on William Faulkner and co-edited with Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec Poetry and Religion: Figures of the Sacred (Peter Lang, 2013) which contains an essay on Hill’s Oraclau/Oracles. Elizabeth Muller has published Yeats (2007), a guide for students and is preparing a monograph study of Yeats and Dante.