Perplexed Insight

This essay explores ‘perplexity’ as a feature of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry and prose, and thereby argues for its categorical salience in literary criticism. Drawing on a range of writers in addition to Hill – Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Michael Clune, Emily Dickinson, and others – it presents perplexity both as cognitive difficulty and as a description of excitingly unresolved reading. Such perplexity, the essay argues, throws us into ‘the live mediatedness that precedes knowing’, and entails a kind of critical judgement that emerges from the phenomenology of reading itself.