Reception of Geoffrey Hill: An anthology

The Reception of Hill: A searchable anthology [updated version, 27/11]

Philip Horne (1985), ‘Bibliography of works by and about Geoffrey Hill: III On Geoffrey Hill’

The Case for Geoffrey Hill, correspondence, LRB, 1985–86

A resource for scholars of Geoffrey Hill

I acknowledge Andrew Michael Roberts’ enabling precedent (Geoffrey Hill, Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2004, 110).

CONTEXT: Tom Paulin, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’, London Review of Books 7.6, 4 April 1985, 13–4, repr. ‘A Visionary Nationalist: Geoffrey Hill’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, London: Faber and Faber, 1992, 276–84:

276: G H tends to appeal almost exclusively to an academic audience.

“: H’s title [KL] is reactionary in its implications

277: Although H’s conservative imagination endorses the cleric’s [Townsend’s] simple-minded concept of national loyalty, it is possible to read much of his verse as a protest against what Hugh Haughton terms ‘the indignity of King Log’.

“: Haughton’s fellow contributors all believe in the magical transcendence of art, and the cover of the volume expresses that archaic humanist cop-out. […] The [dustjacket] painting is clumsy but it does express how seriously H takes himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him.

278: the ‘Pprrpffrrpfff’ of a Leopold Bloom?

“: a collection of dull, dim essays straining to articulate they know not what. […] it is simply the product of a small group of academics who have lost all touch with an audience and society. […] There is something cosy and desperate in their yawping enterprise.

“: Assonating from one loose sentence to the next, Ricks’s mannered style preens itself in a fussily rebarbative manner – […]. There is no glimmer of a critical intelligence in this type of infantile paronomasia: […] Similarity is difference, difference is similarity – anything is like anything else, Ricks’s non-argument suggests.

279: Like most of H’s critics, Ricks takes the poet at his enormous self-estimation. […] Ricks’s arid, nimbling critical manner pretends to discover mystic complexity in pure platitude and bathos.

“: This deadly bit of trivia [‘jam-jar’] is meant to offer a final bucolic epiphany,

“: His trapped critical outlook prevents him from confronting the essentially Blut-und-Boden nature of H’s imagination –

“: This [Pearson] is Jamesian camp […]. Art is daunting, mysterious, difficult of access – the critic must manner himself into it with a great deal of oohing and ahing, and with much affected reverence for the superior mage

280–1: Różewicz has developed an austere, transparent anti-style in order to approach the subject of absolute evil and horror. H relies on a plushy series of mannered pentameters, and the result is a grisly [281] historical voyeurism which – despite Hooker’s insistence to the contrary – sounds both insular and complacent.

281: H is a parasite upon Eliot’s imagination, and any account of his work must face this frankly in order to argue the ultimate authenticity of the style.

“: H’s title [‘Idylls of the King’] is straightforwardly Tennysonian, and so is the poem’s dank, mossy texture, its stagnant vowel-music.

282: At times his evocation of the past’s ‘weightless magnificence’ wobbles slightly as H’s less-than-perfect ear skews the rhythm of the lines. Thus the rhyme ‘flight/twilight’ wrenches the natural vernacular spondee, ‘twilight’, into a fast, freakish iamb, ‘twilight’ […]. The pentameters are too monotonously definite to allow any rhythmic leeway, and the result is a false, flat note. Even so, these lines retain a certain gravid power, though in saying this I’m aware that the buried Anglican in me has a soft spot for this type of visionary mustiness.

282: Although H is endorsing the natural threat posed to collectivist society by the ‘warheads of mushrooms’, the image carries a contradictory suggestion of missile silos, of England as a nuclear province of the United States. Here it would be tempting to detect a Powellite strain in H’s conservatism,

283: [Robinson] baulks at drawing any conclusions from this conjunction of Black Country powers.

“: Does Edwards never switch on Channel 4? Clearly not, or he would realize that British society is not just composed of those neo-Christians Empson so despised.

“: Although Haughton appears not to have entirely lost his faith in the work, he lacks that reverential gullibility which so mars the other essays, […] he describes [… the poems’] disabling evocations of a contradictory ‘lost kingdom’. […] H’s sense of tradition is revealed as bogus because his poetic language originates with the Victorians and ‘can be said to be less their inheritance than their legacy’.

284: It seems to me that this critical enterprise aims to prop up a shabby and reactionary hegemony, and that Haughton – he is clearly radical and egalitarian – ought to have refused to participate in it. Still, he […] is clearly troubled by the authoritarian imagination H’s admirers celebrate.

‘Acknowledgements’, 295: in the case of my discussion of G H I have retained the error which provoked a lengthy correspondence in the [LRB].

Craig Raine, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 2 May 1985, 4.

Martin Dodsworth and E. E. Duncan-Jones, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letters), LRB, 23 May 1985, 4.

Tom Paulin, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 6 June 1985, 4.

Craig Raine, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 20 June 1985, 4.

Martin Dodsworth, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 18 July 1985, 4.

Tom Paulin, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 1 August 1985, 4.

Martin Dodsworth, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 5 September 1985, 4.

John Lucas, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 3 October 1985, 4.

Eric Griffiths and Martin Dodsworth, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letters), LRB, 7 November 1985, 4.

John Lucas, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 5 December 1985, 4–5.

Eric Griffiths, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill’ (letter), LRB, 6 February 1986, 4.

BONUS CONTEXT 1: David Norbrook, ‘Shaggy Fellows’, London Review of Books 9.13, 9 July 1987, 22–3:

22: In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted H for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. H’s admirers responded with extreme defensiveness, representing Paulin’s intrusion of politics into the realm of culture as outrageous vandalism, and arguing that, since he speaks with an Irish accent, he has no right to pronounce upon English poetry. But can a better case be made for H?

“: His poetry is concerned with authority of all kinds, but perhaps above all with the authority of the author.

“: in many earlier poems, he aims rather mechanically for an optimal ambiguity count –

“: And yet he adopts a more critical and ironic view of traditional culture than Paulin implies.

“: [CP] could be said to illustrate the collusion of civilisation with barbarism.

“: Such a vision of universal corruption is politically ambiguous:

“: Paradoxically, H’s obsession with the moral responsibilities of writing threatens to trivialize the issues: […]. An obsession with ethics can be a way of excluding politics, and heaping guilt on poetry’s head may have its own complacency: if poets can be condemned for not being Jesus Christ, one must assume that they are pretty important people.

“: a demystificatory, iconoclastic vein in H’s work.

“: [Hart’s] method is not conducive to forceful overall argument, or to a recognition of weaknesses as well as strengths: the tone tends to be reverential. […] There are too many banalities:

“: [Bloom’s] emphasis is on H’s toughness as a counter to the wimpish utopianism of ‘Marxists and assorted contemporary shamans’.

“: H’s vein of black, satirical comedy at the expense of past masters. His frequent descriptions of this comedy as ‘hilarious’ may arouse misleading expectations, but H’s wit has been underplayed by critics and [23] is a constant counter to the temptations of pomposity.

23: Some readers have condemned the Keatsian or Tennysonian lushness of these sonnets, but H has reworked that idiom in the light of a very different historical and political consciousness, so that the registers jar with each other.

“: H’s poetry would be blander if the acknowledgment of barbarism were not accompanied by powerful celebrations of the monuments of culture.

“: But something is going wrong when H ends up sounding like Shirley Williams: if he has spoken of poems as presenting both terms in an antiphonal ‘drama of reason’, this implies a process, rather than a final product with a detachable political moral.

“: Moreover, it can be questioned whether H really does give opposing voices equal weight. Ambiguity gains its air of even-handedness by first making a set of binary oppositions that are bound to prejudge the issue.

“: But his characteristic strategy is to raise such doubts and then pass on without having fully assimilated them.

“: H’s historical imagination in the end responds more keenly to agrarian rhythms and Tory myths of unity than to the dissenting currents in British history. He is more at home in subverting Tennyson than in accommodating Clough.

“: Again, one can speak of a political ambivalence which is limited in range.

“: A charitable view of the over-literary clumsiness to which Paulin objects, a clumsiness which occurs quite often in the Péguy poem – ‘Landscape is like revelation’ – would be that H is registering resistance to the easy naturalisation of metaphor.

“: The structure of Péguy oscillates, without final stable resolution, between poles of affirmation and satire. Hart draws attention to H’s difficulty in ending the Péguy poem: his iconoclastic vein resists traditional closures. In this sense, his poem deconstructs its own organicism.

“: H retains, for all his iconoclasm, a fastidious distaste for modernity. To the extent that the iconoclast is defined by the images he tries to break, H’s poetry remains a symptom of the problem it so intensely seeks to diagnose.

BONUS CONTEXT 2: John Lucas, ‘Accidents of Language’, London Review of Books 5.20, 3 November 1983, 16, repr. Starting to Explain, Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2003, 276–82.

276: [‘Our Word’] so closely argued that it’s almost impossible to tease out individual threads without running the risk of damaging the entire fabric.

“: [the world] has its own claims, almost its own aggressions,

277: The play of this syntax has about it an untiring self-consciousness that is positively Jamesian. The ‘one’ who speaks does so on behalf of the generality of poets, is any poet.

“: The almost inexhaustible tact of this sentence is typical of the entire essay and might, I suppose, be a mere matter of tactics:

“: it is anti-Arnoldian.

278: History is not merely understood through language, history is language.

“: distinctively post-modern attitude to the world

280: in this new poem it often feels as though he is out for blood. In view of the material he confronts, his rejection of a melioristic, liberal reading of history is proper enough: less proper is what occasionally feels most like a glowering, unlovely egotism, a pedagogy that lacks, say, Yeats’s generous understanding of the motley history forces all of us wear [sic].

“: the poem’s presiding tone is more frequently mandarin, abrasive or – well, schoolmasterly.

281: There is a heavy prosaicism about these lines which occurs elsewhere in the poem, which its rhythms reinforce, and which I dislike because of the way it advertises its seriousness. It too clearly has designs on the reader, as do the obtrusive half-echoes of Tate and Eliot. It is demanding to be taken as important, but ends up seeming merely self-important.

“: I have to say that as far as I am concerned the game seems solipsistic, arbitrary and tiresome. Besides, I cannot note how sweetness devours sorrow in English, because it doesn’t.

“: deliberately contains stylistic graces within a poem that strives for what he presumably regards as more important, more graceless effects.

282: At all events, the strategy of H’s poem seems to be deliberately pyrrhic.

Update: This is published in far more usable form here – all the letters happily are viewable even by non-subscribers.

re Author, author: Long live the Bagatelle!

From Saturday’s Guardian I learnt that frivolity and seriousness were ‘the same thing’.

The same thing.

It was repeated like that. And it occurred to me: Adam Thirlwell can only say this with the expectation that it will interest us because the two things are what they are, and not each other; or because we assume as much. But if he is right — if he convinces us — the statement must become tautologous, and boring. We will no longer be able to detect frivolity in seriousness or seriousness in frivolity because, after all, they are one and the same.

In case his publishers ask for a second edition of his book Serious Poetry, I have alerted Peter McDonald to this. In light of the arguments in Saturday’s Guardian, I suggested, he may want to retool his whole argument.

Except there are questions. Is one seriousness, for example, the same as another? If frivolity and seriousness are the same thing, what is that thing?

The article does not consider them, though, because to the writer they are beside the point. They make the mistake of taking Thirlwell literally: which is a mistake because as soon as Thirlwell's point is made, it ceases to mean what Thirlwell means. Its meaning, and function, is really to indicate in metaphor the writer’s cast of mind, according to which seriousness is frivolous, and frivolity serious. But the article only says what it says intelligibly because we do not share this cast of mind: because the writer is, literally, wrong.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (5)

I am guardian
settle there
settle where
I am, guardian.

That wealth or comfortable living of necessity
means remoteness from
the lusts, the mess, the truth of life.
That you cannot,
from science, make art. That light is describable,
or Shakespeare; or prose
prosaic. That there was a fresh
tenderness to the fucking. (Which isn’t fallacious I agree
but then to define is subjugation, if as well
to question; moreover to define
is to give synonyms, so to diffuse precision
with false equivalence corrupting the commensurate.)
That you
are the reason I cannot sleep, or it is not difficult to say
that which is difficult. What could be called
the labelling of still truth is art
or an art, for the perspective in the phrase is wrong:
truth is the pondskater, labels
the rocks thrown — still except you pitch them. What art there is
is to make the truth look still
by the beauty of your label, of its arc, which
in the moment it misses close, has the skater
appear still, because the label in the moment of eclipse
takes your attention completely. Then that figuring
is not disfigurement. That he hasn’t striven to say clearly
his thoughts, whose difficulty seems in the work (prose, poem)
constructed element of its communication, rather
than the element communicated on account of construction
which it ingenuously is. 
That this will take effect.
That it will affect you, or hold your eye.
That to think is to insist.
That style
will make a novel; that she wasn’t
careless to fall.

(Those men are dead. Nothing to return them.)

                              To start —
What noise does the heart make?
Lubdup lubdup lubdup lubdup. Its fate
dumbly to incant.
                               I slept and slept.

That life is long. That life is brief.

2007

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (4)

That the scale of the earth
is graspable. Or to follow,
that space is. That livid pre-empting anger,
lamplit choler,
ever helps. That it was not your fault.
That in space everything is not dark
but floodlit; in deep space, the nearest star
a fading bulb,
ships would look like cities from the redeye.
The rant is lapidary.
That to bequeath is charity. That that
which we want there to be something more than
is not enough.
That sex is the orgasm, or church
for worship. That the blastocyst is alive
or dead, human or inhuman, sacred or a splat.
That Look after the pennies
and the pounds look after themselves
(other way round). That anyone
but you remembers your embarrassments.
That there is no noun
for the emotion gone through on seeing a sweet child
or animal: the feeling is love, but incipient
and instantly conjured, if not
instantly lost. (Is the wish to savour
innocence sinful?) That originality warrants
praise. Or that helicopters
may defeat locals in their own country.
That fantasies of parenthood are confined
to women. The notion of genius clings
is not fallacy, and well put. That the way is tried.
That coffee is not soluble ire.
That the lies we tell ourselves
               I tell myself
are unnecessary. That you are listening or that I pray.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (3)

That the scary thing
is the puppetmaster, the devil overhead, not the millions
or thousands of us
jerking as he yanks. That I contradict myself
sustainably. That shtick doesn’t mar
most artists, or is not the commonest
reason for art’s failure. That suddenly
it goes cold. For thinking about the dead
is a way of thinking about death, and about
dying. That angels are commonly
apt synonymy (she sang like an angel) 
if you have never seen one (well?) –
it’s merely that the word’s
beautiful. Like orchard.
Like sloe. Or you, aptly deployed.

From the project denominated Failure, or Fallacies (2)

That demons and vampires
and werewolves are not
people imagining other people.
That always
is ever true. That the internet is full of porn
whose deliberate focus
(barely legal, schoolgirls, cheerleaders, teens)
on age is the calculated intervention of cigarsmoking
rottentoothed bad guys
in ivoried wheelchairs behind sequoiawood desks,
rather than blank betrayal of the substantial
market there is for pictures of naked lookalikes of your daughters’
               friends,
and that paedophile hysteria isn’t one expression
of men’s guilt
for uncontrollable lust to force experience
on innocence and for hard revelry in the act of defilement
of innocence that wanted it.
That the Iraq War could’ve gone right
given the men who were in command and their reasons
for waging it. That ends are more
significant than middles; that Hollywood scripts
are more than devious or not so devious
exercises in excusemaking for spectacle: that this is a bad thing.
That sentimentality is popular because it is false.
That love is not knifesharp. That it can
silently be willed away.