Already, like a disciplined scholar, I piece fragments together, past conjecture Establishing true sequences of pain;
For so it is proper to find value In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored: The long-lost words of choice and valediction.
—Geoffrey Hill
For a long time the poetic achievement of Geoffrey Hill was unjustly eclipsed by the cultural dominance of the post-war school of British poetry known as the “Movement” and by its successors. Except for the efforts of a few poets and critics (Donald Hall, William Logan, Christopher Ricks, Harold Bloom), Hill’s poetry has had to speak for itself, since he refuses to participate in the often self-serving rituals of the literary establishment. At a time when the Movement fostered a skeptical, agnostic stance characterized by plain diction, “rational structures,” and a preoccupation with the present moment, Hill produced a series of modernist lyrics soaked in the blood of violence and sacrifice, burdened by history, often baroque in form and sensuous in language. Hill’s poetry has been accused of being cold and difficult, obsessed with religion and the past. But the sheer integrity and depth of his vision, and his genius with language, have kept him in public view.
Indeed, the time may have arrived for Hill to be recognized as one of the few enduring poets of his generation.1 Born in Bromsgrove, England in 1932, Hill began to make his mark even as an undergraduate at Oxford University in the early 1950s. It quickly became evident that Hill’s poetry owed more to modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound than to the Movement poets of his own generation.
In many ways, Hill has been the antithesis of Philip Larkin, a key figure in the Movement. The death of Philip Larkin, the preeminent representative of post-war British poetry, elicited many tributes and memoirs celebrating his unique poetic voice and skill, but it also gave rise to a certain amount of literary soul-searching. For Larkin, the agnostic master of irony, found himself unable to write poetry in the last years of his relatively short life. This silence, far from being pregnant, is uncomfortably close to despair. The modern poetic apocalypse of fire and ice has seemingly played itself out: the Confessional Poets burned themselves out in a blaze of unfocused emotion while the Movement poets ended in a frosty entropy.
Such an apocalypse seems the perfect conclusion to Eliot’s much-abused “dissociation of sensibility” thesis. Geoffrey Hill has struggled to recover a unified vision, and indeed his poetic career might be seen as an extended debate with Eliot—a debate which does not entail opposition per se, but something more like refinement and distinction. Like Eliot, Hill has sought to “purify the language of the tribe” because the decay of word and spirit is coextensive. Hill has confessed to the “priest” in him: a poem must involve a speaker who submits to an “exemplary ordeal,” providing a mimesis for the experience of the rawness and contingency of the world. The poet thus enacts a sacrifice and offers redemption.
But Hill knows that the poet himself stands at one remove from experience: the power of words includes the power to evade or distort reality. Hill has spoken of “the tongue’s atrocities.” In the epigraph to his aesthetic manifesto, a brilliantly condensed essay entitled “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement,’” Hill turns to the theologian Karl Barth to find expression for the paradox of the poet’s relationship to language: “Thus my noblest capacity becomes my deepest perplexity; my noblest opportunity, my uttermost distress; my noblest gift, my darkest menace.”
Though Hill was at Oxford when the Movement poets were coming together, he remained (and continues to remain) aloof from literary groups. The son of a police constable, Hill grew up in Worcestershire. While he cannot be called a regional poet, Hill insists that his native countryside has been one of the most enduring forces in his poetic imagination (this is most evident in Mercian Hymns). Right up to his matriculation at Oxford, Hill sang in his church choir; his appreciation of the formal properties of liturgy and his lifelong grappling with religious aspiration undoubtedly grew out of that youthful experience.
Aside from the obvious influence of the great modernists, Eliot and Yeats, Hill is most indebted artistically (significantly enough) to the Fugitive or Agrarian poets, especially Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. Hill’s poetic career has been carried out in an academic setting, first at the University of Leeds and recently at Cambridge and Boston University. He has also written two dozen dense, but highly rewarding literary essays, many of which are collected in The Lords of Limit.
New Disciplines of Form
Hill’s early collections all bear characteristic stylistic marks, but each has pursued new disciplines of form. For the Unfallen (1959), Hill’s first book, is fully mature: in addition to lyric poems using political and religious themes as metaphors, For the Unfallen includes longer poetic sequences of a type that recurs in Hill’s work. King Log (1968)—the title alludes to a fable of Aesop about good and bad rulers—deals more insistently with political themes: tyranny, guilt, and the way the mind evades and distorts truths which are incriminating. Hill’s next book, Mercian Hymns (1971), defies simple description: it is a series of thirty prose poems centering around Offa, an eighth century king of Mercia (an area in the West Midlands of England, including Hill’s own countryside), the first monarch to unify Britain and thus a “founder” of a political and national order. Like Eliot’s Four Quartets, Mercian Hymns is a poem about England refracted through the prism of the poet’s own life and family history. Tenebrae (1979) returns to lyric forms; the themes are erotic love and spiritual love and the suffering these entail. The metaphors and verse forms derive from the Renaissance (especially Petrarch), and are shot through with the mystical theology of the Spanish Carmelites, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila. Finally, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), a poem of one hundred quatrains, is an extended homage to the Catholic agrarian socialist and visionary killed at the Battle of the Marne. For Hill, Peguy is an integrated man, not an ideologue; the poem celebrates (and criticizes) the French thinker’s attempt to find a myth adequate to provide order for France in the modern era.
Hill, like Wallace Stevens, is a modernist who works primarily within the lyric form, though he has reinvigorated the prose poem in his Mercian Hymns. His poems do not surrender the duty of the poet to give form to experience, but they also reflect the disjointed perception of experience of modern consciousness: thus Hill can write sonnets which nonetheless are syntactically contorted and open-ended. The lines quoted at the head of this essay come from “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz,” a sequence of short lyrics spoken by a figure who acts as Hill’s persona. The “fragments,” which the modernist poet connects, are not merely “thrown together” (the root meaning of “conjecture”); they bespeak human suffering and thus to some extent atone for it. The “bleak skill” of the modern artist consists in rescuing “long-lost words.” These words are not only “choice” in the sense of “well-chosen,” but words involving human choices between good and evil. The use of language is an inescapably moral act.
A Heretic’s Dream of Salvation
In a fallen world, the business of poetry is to establish “true sequences of pain,” warning men of folly and wickedness and redeeming the time. The ubiquity of theological symbols and ideas in Hill’s writings has led some enthusiastic critics to call him a “Christian poet.” But Hill has described his poetry as “a heretic’s dream of salvation expressed in the images of the orthodoxy from which he is excommunicate.” He claims that he is not an agnostic, but his is a thoroughly modern consciousness locked in an anguished dialectic with Christianity. That he has not abandoned belief altogether is a sign of the integrity of his struggle. Though his imagery is Christian, much of Hill’s poetry poses sharp challenges to religious piety, hypocrisy, and escapism. If he is not personally able to subscribe to orthodoxy, his refining sensibility has gone a long way toward making a spiritually valid orthodoxy possible in an age when language has become nearly incapable of communicating transcendence. In one sense, “transcendence” is precisely what Hill himself is unwilling to affirm. He writes, in a poetic sequence entitled “Tenebrae”:
Veni Redemptor, but not in our time.
Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world.
‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned.
Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place.
But to read these lines simply as a rejection of Christian “otherworldliness” is to miss the layers of Hill’s irony. Such a reading, however, is common among the commentators on Hill’s poetry. Henry Hart, author of the first book-length study of Hill, persistently misunderstands Hill’s religious sensitivity. In “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’” Hill quotes Jacques Maritain on the sin of “angelism,” which is “the refusal of the creature to submit to or be ruled by any of the exigencies of the natural order.” Hart takes the Maritain quote, without indicating its source, implies that the words are Hill’s, and equates angelism with “Christian supernaturalism.” But angelism is heretical because it is a false transcendence: it is an attempt to throw off the givenness of nature, the world in which man must struggle. Hill equates angelism with modern technocracy, not with Christian belief.
Hill has been quoted as being fascinated by what he calls “the psychopathology of the false mystical experience” and the “self-indulgent mystical cults of the present day.” A secularized era presents not only the problem of a religious tradition under siege, but a plethora of pseudo-religions providing shallow and dangerous comforts. For Hill, true mysticism is an “exemplary discipline,” a way of giving shape and direction to ascetic and spiritual passions. Without claiming to be a mystic himself, Hill finds in the theology of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila a language which gives meaning to suffering. “He wounds with ecstasy. All the wounds are his own.” Hill demands that religion be true to the human experience of pain and desire, not a sugar-coating of piety.
O light of light, supreme delight;
grace on our lips to our disgrace.
Time roosts on all such golden wrists;
our leanness is our luxury.
Our love is what we love to have;
our faith is in our festivals.
In this and the other sections of Tenebrae Hill uses the traditional analogies between erotic and divine love to interpenetrate each other, revealing the tensions between sacrifice and possession.
A Political Dimension
Not all of Hill’s poetry is quite so mystical in bent; most of it, in fact, extends from the personal to the social realm, giving his art a historical and political dimension that has yet to be properly expounded. Like his modernist predecessors, Hill has an intense awareness of the past in the present, of the relationship between word and deed and between the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth. Much of Hill’s poetry has been written in response to the attitude taken by the Marxist critic, Theodor Adorno, who said: “No poetry after Auschwitz.” Hill has wrestled with the inadequacy of language to comprehend atrocity, but he has not surrendered the poet’s atoning work, nor has he escaped into artifice and wit in order to avoid harsh realities. The epigraph to his second volume of poetry, King Log, comes from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: “From moral virtue let us pass on to matter of power and commandment.” The dichotomy between power and morality implicit in Bacon’s words becomes Hill’s subject.
Unlike so many modern poets, Hill refuses to be drawn into partisan enthusiasms. His whole oeuvre enacts a drive toward objectivity and balance. Yet his “political” poetry is not a dry affair of weights and measures, but a passionate commitment to right order and the disciplines, moral and institutional, that restrain violence and rapacity. Hill’s political dimension cannot be separated from his historical consciousness: the past is not only a book of moral exempla, but alive in the present, whether recognized or not. The tangle of human deceit, sloth, hypocrisy, and lust for power changes little over time. Hill finds his political subjects in the War of the Roses, the two world wars (especially the Holocaust), British imperial conquests, even the American Civil War.
The power of Hill’s vision of social disorder arises not out of its originality, but in its balance of irony, satire, and compassion, its deft linking of personal and social spheres, and its metaphoric subtlety. Hill’s political understanding has been influenced primarily by Eliot and the Southern Agrarians. Though he refuses to sentimentalize bygone golden ages, he holds that a traditional, organic order guided by a common good has been supplanted by technocratic empires of capitalist or totalitarian varieties. His only political heroes are the Radical Tories of the nineteenth century—men who would be echoed by Charles Peguy. Another epigraph from a volume by Hill—this time Mercian Hymns—indicates his awareness of the crucial differences between a society oriented to transcendent principles of order and the leviathan state merely manipulating the “interests” of certain groups. The epigraph, worth quoting in full, is from the English poet C. H. Sisson, another important but sorely neglected post-war literary figure.
The conduct of government rests upon the same foundation and encounters the same difficulties as the conduct of private persons: that is, as to its object and justification, for as to its methods, or technical part, there is all the difference which separates the person from the group, the man acting on behalf of himself from the man acting on behalf of the many. The technical part, in government as in private conduct, is now the only one which is publicly or at any rate generally recognised, as if by this evasion the more difficult part of the subject, which relates to ends, could be avoided. Upon ‘the law of nature and the law of revelation,’ Blackstone said, ‘depend all human laws.’ This quaint language, which would at once be derided if it were introduced now into public discussion, conceals a difficulty which is no less ours than it was our ancestors’.
Mercian Hymns focuses on the figure of Offa as Shakespeare focuses on Bolingbroke in the history plays: the king is ruler, but also an individual soul, the meeting point of the public and private realms.
Against the Gnostics
In “Locust Songs,” three short poems on American history, Hill evokes the tortured and self-destructive dialectic unleashed by America’s Puritan settlers. The gnosticism of the Puritans, which posited nature as an evil, hostile force, is set alongside their belief in the New World as the New Jerusalem. The first poem is called “The Emblem,” an appropriate title in light of the seventeenth-century poetic tradition as practiced in America by the Puritan Edward Taylor.
So with sweet oaths converting the salt earth
To yield, our fathers verged on Paradise:
Each to his own portion of Paradise,
Stung by the innocent venoms of the earth.
Because nature (“salt earth”) is seen as evil, it must be subdued; rather than cooperating with our fathers, nature must “yield” and be dominated in order to yield its harvest. The poem is divided in half: the first two lines set up the image of the Puritans as touching the Promised Land (they only “verge” on it, however); but the final lines contradict that vision: to divide Paradise by attempting to selfishly possess it is to bring on discord and struggle. By putting evil in the natural sphere, the Puritans miss the evil in themselves and set up a moral confusion that will plague American history.
The theme is continued in “Good Husbandry,” but finds a more panoramic expression in the concluding poem, “Shiloh Church, 1862: Twenty-Three Thousand.” The poem is not about the Civil War battle, but Shiloh stands as an image of the civil strife initiated by the Puritans erupting into bloody conflict.
O stamping-ground of the shod Word! So hard
On the heels of the damned red-man we came,
Geneva’s tribe, outlandish and abhorred—
Bland vistas milky with Jehovah’s calm—
Who fell to feasting Nature, the glare
Of buzzards circling; cried to the grim sun
‘Jehovah punish us!’; who went too far;
In deserts dropped the odd white turds of bone;
Whose passion was to find out God in this
His natural filth, voyeur of sacrifice, a slow
Bloody unearthing of the God-in-us.
But with what blood, and to what end, Shiloh?
The Puritans make America the special “stamping-ground” of Christ, damning the Indians and setting up their bland vistas of paradise. Yet there was a “fall”: both to the plunder of nature and to nature’s revenge. Ironically, the false transcendence of the “God-in-us” leads to a surrender to the cruelty of natural forces. Given the divine mandate for “dominion,” the Americans are driven westward in their desire to possess the earth; but they “went too far.” At the mercy of a fiendish dialectic, Americans have lost sight of ends in their struggle for domination over nature. It is a parable with continuing relevance.
It is difficult in the space of an introductory essay to convey what I consider to be the achievement of a difficult but masterful modernist poet. The work of Geoffrey Hill deserves, and will repay, a vast amount of critical attention. His early critics have done much to bring sources to light and prepare paraphrases, but his poetry is already being treated by secular, politically unsophisticated writers in such a way as to constrict the scope of his vision. In my opinion Hill follows Eliot’s path—the path of history, religious struggle, and the purification of language—in the modernist tradition. The other modernists—Pound, Joyce, Olson, Williams, et al—have erected great epics of the self, but in the end their art founders upon the very limitation of their selfhood. Eliot and Hill begin with the self but move outwards. As Hill has written, “From the depths of the self we rise to a concurrence with that which is not-self.” That “rise” is accompanied by suffering and atonement, artistic mastery and an acknowledgment of the limits of art. The poetry of Geoffrey Hill traces this movement.