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 judgment that emerges from the phenomenology of reading itself.