Geoffrey Hill disagrees with Carol Ann Duffy on poetry “as a form of texting”

January 31, 2012 In a recent lecture, Oxford University professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill laid out his reasons for disagreeing with British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s views about poetry, as expressed in a September 2011 interview with The Guardian, in which she said: “The poem is a form of texting . . . it’s the original text. [ . . . ] It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.”

Geoffrey Hill agrees with Carol Ann Duffy that poetry is condensed. However, “Text is not condensed, it is truncated,” he said. “What is more, it is normally an affectation of brevity; to express to as 2 and you as u intensifies nothing.” Read more about his views here.