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So, Geoffrey Hill has a new book out which when I have digested it shall talk about. In the meantime I'd like to see who else here likes Geoffrey Hill, or if they don't and why not, and try and get people interested.
So, basics. Here's the Wiki. Here's a site full of resources. Here's the Paris Review.Here is a Guardian biopic. I'd like to quote at length from the Guardian piece, as it gives a competent over-view of Hill's career and I don't want to run into cheap para-phrasing:
When Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems were published in 1985, the publisher took some pleasure in running critical reviews up against the positive ones: "unbearable, bullying, intransigent, intolerant, brilliant... mandarin and rarefied... warmth in these poems is like a dying sun seen through a wall of ice". The publisher's blurb concluded that "this poetry... has disturbed the critical consensus for three decades".
Despite the plaudits of such distinguished and diverse writers as George Steiner, Harold Bloom and AN Wilson, Hill seems now, nearly two decades later, still to be disturbing the critical consensus, and to have a more enthusiastic following in the US, where he lives and works in Boston, than in his native England. The irony being that Hill is a profoundly English poet, rooted in the landscape and history of his native country, to which he returns every summer.
Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932. "If you stood at the top of the field opposite our house," he once recalled, "you looked right across the Severn Valley to the Clee Hills and the Welsh hills very faint and far off behind them." At the age of eight, he witnessed the Nazi bombing which destroyed Coventry.
Hill's work is marked by memories of the war, and contemplations of European history. His father and grandfather were village policemen. Hill identifies himself as working-class - indeed is "glad and proud to have been born into the English working class". He commemorated his maternal grandmother, who had spent her life making nails, in poem XXV of Mercian Hymns : "I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg [a day's work]... It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire."
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The poems on which Hill worked throughout the 1960s, culminating in King Log in 1968, were antipathetic to the fashions of that decade; on the one side, the success of Larkin, the Movement poets, or Ted Hughes; on the other, the "pop" and "performance" poets. Hill's Funeral Music is a sequence about the Wars of the Roses; it attempts, as Hill's own note says, "a florid, grim music broken by cries and shrieks... ornate and heartless music broken by mutterings and blasphemies and cries for help".
The heartlessness is not Hill's, though the chilling scrupulosity of its phrasing has sometimes misled casual readers. Hill regards, for example, the battle of Towton (1461) as "a holocaust" which "commands one's belated witness". The violence, horror and hopelessness are captured; the poetry also asks difficult questions about remembrance, aesthetics, martyrdom and witness.
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Only three years later, Hill published Mercian Hymns, a sequence of 30 prose poems, combining the life of the eighth-century Mercian ruler, King Offa, with memories of Hill's own childhood in the modern Mercia of the Midlands. Hill had now established himself as one of England's more remarkable poetic talents. Thwaite considers that "Mercian Hymns was the high point [of Hill's English reception]; Ian Hamilton's New Review had a symposium, and a majority of the respondents rated Mercian Hymns as one of the important books of the previous 10 years."
It is a book admired even by Hill's detractors, and by both experimental and mainstream writers. The poet Roy Fisher, whose roots are very close to Hill's in terms of both geography and class, wrote that "it is thought of as tending to make an aesthetico-political sound far to the right of what I'm about. And there is this priestly and hieratic quality which some of the people who like what I like would think of as rather tight and bombastic. I was caught by it very much. The idea of there being a history of quite savage energy which is almost recoverable from the body of Middle England, that seems to me worth looking at and worth exploring."
The note of political disquiet in Fisher's comments has been shared by others. By the 1980s, Hill was being described, by critics including Tom Paulin, as if he was a conservative nationalist and a nostalgic imperialist. In fact he is, one friend believes, " a life-long Labour voter". To account for this aspect of his reception, Hill notes that "in 1978 I was interviewed by the New Statesman when Tenebrae won some sort of prize. The interviewer asked me where my political sympathies lay. And I said - and this sealed my fate - that I greatly admired the 19th-century radical Tories. And yet if one knows anything about the radical Tories of the 19th century - particularly Oastler, who, for example, ameliorated the working conditions of children in factories - some of the noblest work was done by people like him, and I think radical Toryism is a vitally democratic thing. From then on I have been pigeonholed as a right-wing reactionary, chthonic nationalist and imperialist."
The political angle to the criticism persisted even after the 1996 publication of Canaan, where the corruption of the Tory party in the early 1990s is met with forensic contempt: "Where's probity in this - / the slither-frisk/ to lordship of a kind/ as rats to a bird-table?" Today, Hill simply says that "The right-left divide is wholly redundant; there is scarcely any difference I can detect between Blairite Labour and Thatcherite conservatism; they're both utterly materialist from top to bottom."
So there we are. The important thing for me is how apart Hill is and has always been, and how the result of this is that the stuff he was writing decades ago is still as fierce and alive as ever, where other things written at the time have faded and most contemporary poetry pales in comparison. I would go as far to say that he is the poet keeping English poetry alive. I'd also describe him as an "engaged" poet in the good sense of the word - engaged in languages and characters of all kinds, landscapes ancient and brand-new. Contrast this with such "political engagements" as Armitage's forced "man on the street" persona, which continually steers his course away from profundity and into banality, and Duffy's one-note scheme of finding a tradition and turning one of the main actors into a woman, which she does over and over again with less and less originality. Not that these two poets aren't very good - but these are the things which keep from the hill-top, as it were.
Let me quote from a bollocks review of Hill by an idiot writer, Laurie Smith, who has decided that Hill is a Fascist:
Extraordinarily Potts cannot see that Carson and Hill share a common aim which is achieved by a common method. It is to interweave their material with such a frequency of cultural reference that the reader loses confidence in her ability to understand, therefore to judge, what she is reading. Faced with a plethora of references to 'high' culture which she feels she ought to know but does not, the reader feels increasingly ignorant and unworthy. She is forced to accept the poem on the poet's terms or not at all; her critical faculty is subdued.
Here Smith chooses to read Hill's allusions as a deliberate attempt to upset or harm the reader. The kind of reader Smith seems to want is one who doesn't have to know anything about literature, who can remain safely disengaged from the tradition of literature and history and all it's problems. Because you can't do this when reading Hill, Smith seems to have taken a dislike so strong it destroys any attention that might have been paid to the beautiful sounds and delicate ideas in Hill's poetry - not to mention Smith's choice of "she" to describe the reader, which in this particular case reeks of trying to define a victimized reader.
Is it really impossible, that when faced with a reference to the classics, one might feel interested and inspired to go out and read more? Is the "I don't get this right away, and so it is bad" reflex really a legitimate readerly position?
Admittedly there are significant differences between Carson and Hill. Carson has a conventional mind and, in a show of being accessible, provides notes to some of her references. As in her previous books, her aim is by modernist techniques to distract attention from her inability to write beautifully or resonantly. Hill is capable of fine writing, but explains nothing; for example, Speech! Speech! contains numerous quotations in the main European languages, none of them translated or glossed. Hill's aim is that of Pound of the Cantos, his acknowledged master - to expound a view of culture in which the past is held up as admirable and the present dismissed as worthless. It is a view that brooks no argument, no discussion, and is, in the sense that Pound respectfully used the word, fascist.
So, people who try to do interesting things with form must by rights be inadequate or inauthentic in some other way (i.e. they can't write "beautifully", whatever that means); and one always has to explain exactly what a given allusory line refers to. It doesn't seem to occur to Smith that if you put into a poem some sort of allusion only to explain it away, you're forcing one authorized meaning on something ambiguous, putting the author's stamp on the reference rather than allowing it to resonate variously in the public frame.
As for calling Hill a Fascist, in Hill's own terms, surely the complex is democratic, and the democratic complex; do not tyrannies run on and by simplicity? If a thing we make out of language makes us realize there is still more out there to find out about and enjoy, surely that's a good thing? |
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