Oxford University Press has announced this coming November as the publication date for Geoffrey Hill’s collected poetical writings, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012.
[Update 25.3.13: Cover Image]
Who else will OUP be publishing this year? Here’s a complete list of all poetry titles:
- Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies
- Rumi, The Masnavi (bk 3)
- Robert Herrick, Complete Poetry (2 vols)
- William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
- Ovid, Fasti (trans Waldman)
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Selected Poems
- Robert Burns, Selected Poems and Songs
- John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems
Some company.
Being published by OUP isn’t the same as being published in its World’s Classics or Oxford English Texts series. We don’t take publication merely by Penguin to be the same as publication in its Penguin Classics series.
Sure – agreed. So ignore those four Classics titles. Ignore the Burns too if that’s too pulpy or mass market for you. Now the list is Hill, Herrick, and Milton. Some company. And a sort of implied hierarchy. Take away the blue-slipcased doorstoppers and you have…
All I was underlining is that OUP publishes very little poetry, no contemporary poetry, and virtually nothing that doesn’t appear on every university syllabus. Interestingly Isaac Rosenberg is OUP’s most recent (Feb 2012) most recent (d. 1918) poet.
OUP’s poetry list was famously retired in 1999, sending O’Shem, Raine, Porter et al. (but not Hill) into the wilderness, aka Carcanet.
So, given that there is no series for contemporary poetry, how would you class Hill’s collected in the catalogue? OUP.com classes it with the ones I’ve listed.