| Summary: | My project aims to examine the multilingual intertextuality of Geoffrey Hill's poetry, in order to demonstrate the Europeanness of that body of work. It argues that multilingual intertextual dialogues constitute an extensive European dimension, and are an integral part of Hill's oeuvre. In the first place, these European dialogues are key elements in developing the themes and the forms that define individual poems. At the same time, they are instrumental in furthering what I argue are the core aspects of his poetics: his commitment to creating poetry as a public act with ethical and political value, and the correlative engagement with the position and significance of a subjective 'I' in poetry. Furthermore, this study asserts that the European dimension of Hill's work closely connects it to the rise of internationalism in post-war English poetry, and, therefore, allows a closer understanding of its relationship with the later twentieth century. Drawing on the theories of intertextuality articulated by Bakhtin and Kristeva, my project defines intertextual relations as metaphorical dialogues between different texts, which have both constructive and disruptive effects on the poems and the discourses they are part of. This distinction between constructive and disruptive intertextuality provides the framework for a discussion of the intertextual dialogues in relation to each other as well as a series of individual, separate cases. My study will engage exclusively with metaphorical dialogues involving texts from different European languages and literatures, and therefore with an intertextuality that is specifically multilingual.
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