GEOFFREY HILL is a poet before he is an academic. Five volumes of verse and a translation of Ibsen’s Brand come before this collection of criticism. Delivering his inaugural lecture as professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds in 1977, Hill is properly modest about his poetic achievement – ‘That I have had some practice in the making of verse is evidence to be noted, I think; if only as a glint of improper goliardic song in the margin of a proper gospel’ – but the whole discourse, entitled ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, despite its concentration on the work of others, is grounded in the triumphs and doubts of his own practice. One has the impression of so powerful a desire for self-effacement, as a poet if not, which would be unseemly, as one who professes poetry, that a perhaps excessive multiplicity of citation and allusion serves as a sequined motley which, seeming to hide his nakedness, exposes it all the more.
‘Atonement’ is used in its radical sense of ‘at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony.’ Eliot speaks Hill’s own devotional language when, describing the elation of having achieved that arrangement or words which, being right, seems ordained and inevitable, he speaks of a sense of ‘exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation.’ The humility, then, of one who has attained the vision. Wherein lies the ‘menace’ of Hill’s title? If I read him right, it is in the pride of rhetorical achievement, of verbal mastery, that opposes self-surrender. When Yeats, in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, submits to lying down in ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,’ the language he uses denies the theme. ‘How is it possible… to revoke ‘masterful images’ in images that are themselves masterful?’
The poet, and the imaginative writer in general, rest in a state of dilemma which may be morally glossed as hypocrisy. There is empirical as well as theological guilt. One makes errors and one sins, but while sins may be forgiven, as Chesterton says, there is no forgiveness for faux pas. Or, to put it in the weightier words of Helen Waddell’s Gilles de Vannes, ‘… There is no canonical repentance for a mistake.’ Hill’s theological stance is firm enough for him to see the comparative absurdity of the knitting editor’s guilt at publishing an error which ensures that ‘there are jerseys all over England with one arm longer than the other,’ but (how about a published recipe which accidentally gets the quantities wrong? Sophia Loren, I remember, was near suicidal over an error in her L’amore nella cucina which turned a dolce into an emetic) he does not condemn Simone Weil as an obsessional neurotic for proposing penal servitude for sinners against accuracy in printed texts or radio broadcasts. Grammar itself is a ‘social and public institution’, and to offend against it may be regarded as a criminal act. Sin, however, is a different matter. Or is it?
The poet’s responsibility to agonise over his statements (with, one might think, a scrupulosity that kills creative joy) exists on both a theological and a social level, but properly these should coincide. In law, morality is based on expediency only when society is debased or, in an emergency like war, is compelled to blur its sense of moral absolutes. No society can be wholly secular. In an essay entitled ‘The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert Southwell,’ Hill takes an English Catholic poet best known, though very inadequately known, for ‘The Burning Babe’, a poem which looks to many secular readers like mawkish devotionalism but must be seen in a wider and more poignant context than the Oxford Book of English Verse can provide. Southwell was a flame of Elizabethan recusancy, whose writings show skill in polemic and also in silence, ‘choosing not-to-say’ as his tormentor interpreted it, calling him a ‘monster’ of ‘strange taciturnity’. Robert Cecil, seeing Southwell subjected to a ‘new kind of torture,’ remarked that he remained ‘as dumb as a tree-stump; and it had not been possible to make him utter one word.’ Here was the ultimate scrupulosity.
But one word that Southwell did utter was ‘equitie’, a word describing a principle of justice based on something larger than expediency. Southwell found that Topcliffe was ‘not open to reason’, meaning that he had forfeited a traditional principle of law for the new, hypo-critical and destructive device of ‘reason of state.’ No man submits to martyrdom lightly. If, like Southwell or Campion, he has the duty to state his position in words, he must think about those words carefully and even decide when silence is a word. Thinking of words in prospect of a shameful and agonising death means seeing them less as the counters of the marketplace than an ambiguous complexities, the material of the poet. ‘Atonement’ and ‘menace’ now relate to more terrible immediacies than those of a professional address The ‘reasonableness’ of Southwell encompasses both religious discipline and what Fr Devlin terms ‘an element of supernatural wildness.’ Hill finds in Southwell a ‘complex simplicity’ appropriate equally to the poet and the martyr.
It is perhaps in order to see in another poet, one who considered himself to be martyrised by ‘reason of state’, a failure of scrupulosity unforgiveable in one committed to getting words right. Ezra Pound was an important poet but not a satisfactory one. The strength of his work lies in a brilliance of rhetoric which is often set parallel to meaning. We can read the Cantos with excitement, but we take the obsession with Usura as a discardable eccentricity. Unfortunately, history forces us to take it as something else, for the obsession got out of literature into the real world of political reality and war. ‘The crime with which he is charged,’ said one of the experts at the Washington hearing, ‘is closely tied up with his profession of writing.’ Literature, in an age which has lost its sense of ‘absolute reasonableness’, is no longer appropriate to sanity or right action. ‘Our word is our bond,’ Hill says, not only in the title of his essay, and Pound ought not to have misconstrued ‘a fine point of semantic.’ Shelley did a lot of harm with his boast about poets being unacknowledged legislators. What poets can do is to judge after the act. It was perhaps in order for Pound to denounce Usura as a historical wrong, but he believed that poets’ ‘judicial sentences’ could have a legislative or executive validity. ‘The ‘world’s revenge’, during his court hearing and its aftermath, was unwittingly to pay him back, confusion for confusion, with legislative or executive acts presuming to be true verdictives.’
Moral concern illuminates Professor Hill’s discussions of Jonson’s Sejanus, Swift’s poetry of ‘reaction’, Cymbeline, and the dangerously perplexed world of T.H. Green. He is perhaps at his best in an essay called ‘Redeeming the Time’, in which, after respectfully differing from Iris Murdoch on her statement, in her essay on Sartre, that the disruptive forces of the nineteenth century were ‘dispossessed and weak… incoherent, disunited, and speechless,’ he seeks to demonstrate how the very rhythms of Victorian poetry and prose, to say nothing of public rhetoric, illustrate doubt and breakdown. Hopkins’s ear he takes to be the organ best attuned to the sense of dissolution in that time. ‘Decomposition’ is set against ‘composition’, and in no Gilbertian pub. If ‘Harry Ploughman’ combines work song, shanty, and liturgical chant – the organic rhythms – ‘Tom’s Garland’ is crabbed, harsh, and near-incoherent in mimesis of its subject, the Victorian unemployed. ‘Tom’s Garland’, thinks Hill, is a failure, ‘but it fails to some purpose; it is a test to breaking point of the sustaining power of language.’ Hopkins considered the poem to be too highly wrought, over-composed rather than a model of decomposition: I would say that its skill lies in its appearance of failure. But Hill is not often wrong about Hopkins.
The age, says Hill, was decadent, and critics of Hopkins have heard in him the voice of that decadence, particularly Donald Davie’s: ‘He cultivates his hysteria and pushes his sickness to the limit.’ For hysteria read passion and ecstasy; for sickness the dark night of the soul. Such terms have become sectarian. All of Hill’s essays imply, if they do not directly state, a useless regret at the fissure that was opening in British life and letters when Southwell saw the burning babe from the scaffold. His perceptions are exquisite and his reading is wide. ‘O Lords of Limit, training dark and light…’ The epigraph is from Auden. A more pertinent one is from J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things with Words: ‘And for this reason we call the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances, the doctrine of the Infelicities.’ Hill is good on the infelicities.
Times Literary Supplement, 4 May 1984
Review of The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas by
Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)