Epanalepsis. Sobre The Triumph of Love de Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

It has been stated that Geoffrey Hill is one of the most important English poets of his generation and one of the most influential in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. Nevertheless, the echoes of his poetry have failed to reach the Spanish-speaking world —and particularly Latin America— unlike those of his fellow countryman Ted Hughes, for instance. This essay is aimed at offering a reading, from Mexico, of one of his latest long poems, The Triumph of Love. This will be attempted by means of the exploration of a particular rhetorical figure that Hill proposes as the very axis of his poem —epanalepsis. It is stated here that epanalepsis transcends its most basic definition —as the repetition of the initial word of a verse at the end— in order to become an extended figure of thought implying an “eternal return” to the all-encompassing vision of poetry. The possibilities of Hill’s verse as a means to analyze a chaotic and essentially self-absorbed world are also considered.