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Oppositional Principles

Geoffrey Hill

in Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address

This chapter probes Hill's sense that a poet's fulfilment of his role is connected with the ability to engage appropriately with listeners: the right forms of address to the right addressees. It ... More

This chapter probes Hill's sense that a poet's fulfilment of his role is connected with the ability to engage appropriately with listeners: the right forms of address to the right addressees. It argues address demands breaking and preserving customary good behaviours, accusatory and commendatory responses, focusing on Hill's argumentative addresses in lectures and essays. It explores the predominantly haranguing address: interlocutions directed at others. Julien Benda, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, William Empson, and Stephan Collini are put into play alongside Hill's addresses. Each of these writers articulates misgivings about authorial inspiration. Each focuses on the writer's susceptibility, the danger of succumbing to misplaced pride when exposed to the ‘crowd’. In Hill's public addresses, ‘real denunciation’ is hard labour, a verbal warfare turned as much upon oneself as upon others. The poet-critic witnesses his own susceptibilities and betrayals in ‘the public institution’ of language.Less

The Pitch of Dissent: Geoffrey Hill

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once ... More

Writing about his version for the stage of Henrik Ibsen's Brand, Geoffrey Hill voices some powerful (if presently discomforting) ideas about the nature and significance of verse as being ‘at once character and enactment…itself both absolute wilt and contingency’. ‘Will’ is a matter central to the writing of poetry, though it is arguably something less accessible for poetry criticism. The poetry's sense of timing is a matter of importance, and more than just a way of speaking about particular patterns of syntax and metre. This chapter also examines Hill's poem The Triumph of Love and the questions it raises about language and difficulty, as well as rhythm and timing in his other work Speech! Speech!.Less

Geoffrey Hill's Debts

Tim Kendall

in Modern English War Poetry

This chapter explores the war poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Hill's is a poetry of witness which, in all but a manner of speaking, ‘wasn't there’. That crucial fact of absence is never disguised. He ... More

This chapter explores the war poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Hill's is a poetry of witness which, in all but a manner of speaking, ‘wasn't there’. That crucial fact of absence is never disguised. He observes earlier in The Triumph of Love, ‘If witness meant witness, all could be martyrs’: his awareness of etymological kinship discovers in the past a point of convergence for his correlated explorations of the poetry of war and the psychology of religious martyrdom. That witness no longer means witness (except in a manner of speaking often voiced by Hill) is a circumstance that he might be expected to deplore, having stated in 1981 that ‘The history of the creation and the debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and original justice’. Some of Hill's admirers have been too credulous of the linguistic and religious claims made by such a self-consciously post-lapsarian vision, having never thought to enquire when and where this ‘kingdom of innocence and original justice’ existed. Whether the meaning of words is debased or evolves over time is a debate which never touches the poet's confidence that ‘sematology is a theological dimension’.Less

Just Concessions: Conviction, Persuasion, Coercion

Geoffrey Hill

in Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address

This chapter focuses on Hill's use of address for persuasion and concession. These are nearly always pejorative terms in Hill, allied with weakness, susceptibility to coercion. Attentive to ... More

This chapter focuses on Hill's use of address for persuasion and concession. These are nearly always pejorative terms in Hill, allied with weakness, susceptibility to coercion. Attentive to Wordsworth's ‘Convention of Cintra’ (quoted by Hill in The Triumph of Love) and to Wordsworth's sentiment that poetry must befit its audience and ‘adopt the very language of men’, this chapter questions the extent to which Hill's address similarly pursues a ‘struggle / for a noble vernacular’. To what extent are the speakers’ persuasively ‘humbled’ confessions deemed problematic in such work? This chapter focuses particularly on the essay ‘Our Word is Our Bond’ and on Hill's uneasy textual relationships with Eliot, Pound, and J. L. Austin.Less

Epilogue: Sympathy Now

Sophie Ratcliffe

in On Sympathy

The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, ... More

The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel, Jane Smiley, and Geoffrey Hill. The epilogue concludes by arguing against the implied association between empathy, sympathy, reading and moral virtue.Less

Civil Invitations: Common Readers

Geoffrey Hill

in Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address

This chapter focuses on Hill's rude addresses, often levelled towards editors and critics (Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem). Such address has been read as unidirectional redress; personal railing that ... More

This chapter focuses on Hill's rude addresses, often levelled towards editors and critics (Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem). Such address has been read as unidirectional redress; personal railing that rejects responses from the yous it upbraids. The chapter explores the different communities of address negotiated by Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power, and considers the figure of the literary ‘rebel’, as he moves in crowds and readerships, addressing commemorated figures and the intelligentsia. Critical of Eliot's ‘common reader’, Hill insists that address is not comfortably middle-brow activity, pressing upon you common ‘difficulty’. Poetry wields ‘pain’ and ‘stark indignation’ as weapons against the secure and elite. The poet's, and the common man's, speech comes from that rich, shared history employed by the Modernists; from artworks, events, and memorials, and from the patterns of working-class speech/life. But are Hill's addresses successfully self-upbraiding in donning the public voice that accosts itself in doing verbal battle with others?Less

Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From ... More

This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression, and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring.Less

Three Critics: T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which ... More

T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which his own opinions had come to carry. The young Eliot went on to be seen as the ancestor of an altogether less dangerous school of literary criticism in the United States and Britain, many of whose members adopted his literary enthusiasms and dislikes, along with a few motifs of interpretation held to be his ideas. Eliot confessed that he can never re-read any of his own prose writings without acute embarrassment. This chapter also examines the poem The Redress of Poetry, in which Seamus Heaney gives more than a glimpse of the charm, grace, and carefully judged gravity with which the poet handled his acts of praise. Geoffrey Hill as a poet-critic and the influence of his critical work on contemporary poetry other than his own are also discussed.Less

Afterword: ‘“I have not finished”’

Jeffrey Wainwright

in Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place ... More

Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place in Geoffrey Hill's poetic imagination right from the beginning. In ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, littoral and sunlight work as a metaphor for ‘well dug-in language’ itself. All of Hill's work in the tilth of language knows that metaphor is but one instance of its approximate nature, that it ‘pitches us as it finds’. But his wintry, hedged, clouded, ‘rare pale’ sunlights might sometimes pitch him, and so his readers, beyond labouring.Less

‘Rather than words’: The End of Authority?

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

Form is the serious heart of a poem where such ‘authority’ as poetry bears must reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run his business in broader senses. ... More

Form is the serious heart of a poem where such ‘authority’ as poetry bears must reside. In this sense, the poem is a serious business, however the poet chooses to run his business in broader senses. Authority is not something that may be said to come to an end; although its name might not be spoken, or might change, it is always a basic condition of any contemporary literature. But poetry's dealings with authority, in this sense, are seldom straightforward. These arguments are illustrated in this book, which examines 20th-century British and Irish poetry by focusing on the works of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. This introductory chapter also analyses the form and execution of ‘Church Going’, a poem by Philip Larkin.Less

Authority and Eccentricity

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It argues that the ‘praxis of an individual style’ in his work involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially ... More

This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It argues that the ‘praxis of an individual style’ in his work involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially true of his recent volumes, with their capricious swerves between savage indignation and comic deflation, the eulogistic and the elegiac. It considers Hill's sense of what it means to be ‘eccentric’ to gain insight on the poet's strange behaviour on the page.Less

‘Acceptable words’

Jeffrey Wainwright

in Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together ... More

Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together from the uncountable range of possibilities of a number of words that simply present themselves as ‘right’ seems not only a beauty but a mystery beyond the laws of logic or rhetoric. It is in part because Geoffrey Hill's work, in poetry and prose, is in perpetual struggle with ‘plain speaking’ that he is drawn to write so often on seventeenth-century subjects.Less

Prevailing Tastes

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter argues that Geoffrey Hill's critical and poetic sensibility was influenced by the opinions of Wordsworth and Coleridge on matters of taste. His critical writings reflect a scrupulous, ... More

This chapter argues that Geoffrey Hill's critical and poetic sensibility was influenced by the opinions of Wordsworth and Coleridge on matters of taste. His critical writings reflect a scrupulous, even suspicious alertness to the ways in which ideas of ‘taste’ inform, and sometimes threaten to degrade, literary evaluation. Hill recognizes that a faculty so often innocently configured as a quality of autonomous, subjective choice may in reality be determined and directed by an oppressive Zeitgeist.Less

A Conflict of Opposites

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It considers Hills awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium — with all its debasements, approximations, and equivocations — and ... More

This chapter explores the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It considers Hills awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium — with all its debasements, approximations, and equivocations — and his efforts to work against it, by subjecting words to formal pressures and shaping impulses so as to intimate an ideal of perfectibility beyond the tormenting encounter with imperfection. This tension may be understood in terms of a so-called ‘conflict of opposites’, as seen in Hill's profession that poetry occupies an intermediate position between the ‘kingdom of incurable anxiety’ of which Charles Péguy once spoke and an inaccessible ‘transcendent kingdom […] wherein truth abides’, as described by Simone Weil.Less

Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux

David-Antoine Williams

in The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry

This chapter is an investigation into Geoffrey Hill’s philosophy of language, which is at its heart philological and etymological, and which engages questions of theology, metaphysics, ontology, ... More

This chapter is an investigation into Geoffrey Hill’s philosophy of language, which is at its heart philological and etymological, and which engages questions of theology, metaphysics, ontology, ethics, and poetics. It is a philosophy that is perpetually led back to states of self-opposition and contradiction, latterly described as ‘agon’, and ‘gnostic poiesis’. Etymologically this is manifested in the terms which receive extensive poetic and critical attention in Hill—terms which lie on an ‘active–passive divide’—as well as in the method of interrogation, which is self-oppositionally both a ‘tearing up by the roots’ and a ‘rediscovering’ and careful ‘nurturing’ of them. Hill’s various paradigms for language and for poetry are examined, centring on Hebrew language, the fable of the Fall of Man, Original Sin and its early modern metaphysical extensions, and gnosticism, as well as his sources in Milton and Coleridge.Less