Bridget Vincent
Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill
Oxford University Press, 2022
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.
About the Author
Bridget Vincent completed a PhD at Cambridge University as a General Sir John Monash Scholar and a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. This was followed by a period as a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Clare Hall, Cambridge, funded by an Endeavour Research Fellowship. Before coming to the ANU, she taught on modern and contemporary literature at the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham. She has a longstanding interest in the public role of the humanities, and while at the University of Melbourne created a program designed to foster conversations in young people about the civic importance of critical thinking. She has also published literary journalism and op-eds in The Guardian, The Times Higher Education, The Age, Cordite and The Australian Book Review.
