Abstract
The bulk of this thesis takes the form of an annotated edition of Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (2000), a long poem comprised of 120 twelve-line stanzas, and renowned for its density of reference and allusion, rebarbative typography and general inaccessibility. The annotations address the poem line-by-line and stanza-by-stanza: footnotes identify and explain the myriad particulars within the text; discursive commentaries on each stanza identify thematic development and repetition and perform the conceptual work which is beyond the scope of the footnote. Through this close textual analysis I aim to do two things: first, to determine the true nature of the poem by taking a thorough account of its content; and second, to prove the fundamental accessibility of the poem through the implicit argument made by relentlessly and mechanically ‘accessing’ the text. A long introductory essay addresses the place of the poem in Hill’s oeuvre, its critical reception, the methodology and practice of annotation, Hill’s understanding of poetic difficulty, and the relationship between annotation and textual accessibility.