The January party

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The January Party is an original volume of poems accompanied by a critical essay entitled Graphs of Totality. The poems engage and revise historical genres of poems such as the elegy and prayers based upon the canonical hours. Graphs of Totality identifies a previously under-appreciated relationship between the British poet Geoffrey Hill, modernism and the historical avant-garde. In the essay I trace how Hill balances recognitions of debts to modernism and the avant-garde along with doubts about the efficacy of their revolutionary aesthetics. Graphs of Totality also discuss the ways in which Hill's late work revises and reinscribes the avantgarde ambition to transcend art's merely institutional status. The essay further argues that Hill attains a particular form of postmodernism by resisting the totalizing distortions that are profoundly implicated in visions of totality.