I first came across Geoffrey Hill around 1994, because he was included in the 1975 Anthology put together by George Macbeth (Poetry 1900 to 1975). It’s necessary for a critic to disclose how he became familiar with a poet, even a major one, these days, since our culture does not exactly force poetry into your path in life; and poets will always need a handy introduction, too, these days; if the critic is going to be talking about a particular poetic work, then it is wise to assume his reader is not familiar with that work, yet. In this essay, I am going to do that. Later on, I will look at the matter of faith and Hill’s style.
As with other contemporary poets, you would struggle to know they exist, unless they were anthologised alongside the glorious dead. He was beside Eliot and Yeats and Larkin in that anthology. It’s a bad time for poetry. Hill was one of the later entries in the collection, added in the second edition, and was, at that time, at the beginning of his career. Hill’s poems published there seemed to me to be short, professional, and memorable. I decided to procure and read his Collected Poems of 1985, and I agreed with Macbeth that Hill reminded you of the young Milton.
If his Collected Poems was out in 1985, his next book, Canaan, was published more than a decade later, in 1996; and after getting the first edition of that book, I kept up with his books of poetry as they were published through the 2000s. I had an opportunity to go and hear him read when he released Without Title, in 2010, but did not do so.
Hill presents to us major problems, because he was a major poet, but not a perfect master. A.N. Wilson, Harold Bloom and others, recognised in him the dominant and important voice of English poetry at the turn of the century: so much for his being a good or great poet. And the problem is, that his rage and hatred of his own era makes him both very grand and very strange: so much for his being imperfect.
I cannot think of another poet of his ability, whose consistent theme and preoccupation after 1996, when he was already in his sixties, was how badly he thought of his country and everyone in it. Style is the expression of the man, and Hill’s style was very difficult, very compressed, unclear, and indifferent to his fellow men. Even his prose style is one of leaps across lines of argument, without much consideration for the reader – because he disliked his reader. His prose in the collection Style and Faith, when I read it to find out more about the man, I believed to have been a low volume print, a private publication, where the essays were written mostly for his own vanity.
He was clearly working in isolation: that’s how his poetry presents itself, and also his prose. He claimed in his last collection of poems, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, that the poetic profession still exists, but that it gathers together only enough people to read or study it, as might man a whaling station; where poetry reading and study and writing was once a great empire, its territory is confined to a space no bigger than Pitcairn island, and that’s how he wrote – for handful of devotees, if any. Style and Faith consists of essays which are so difficult and abstruse, that it is a surprise to find what is in fact the case, that they were published in the Times Literary Supplement and the like, and that while composing them he was also Oxford Professor of Poetry. It is therefore obvious, that he chose to be difficult, when he could or ought to have been democratic and easy. This obscure style, along with his misanthropy, is what I am going to look at in this essay.
Hill chose the difficult style because it is entirely appropriate to dislike our age, and our people. His misanthropy was not unjustified, or rather, he could justify it. He objected to universal suffrage, or democracy. For instance, he disliked the irreligion and materialism of the times. That he wrote in a difficult style was natural in a man who considered the reading public to be stupid, or uneducated. Naturally, he rarely said this out loud in print in that straightforward way. I suppose that another of my intentions here, is the obnoxious and argumentative one, of giving reasons why I agree with him.
Hill’s is an educated, allusive style; he speaks for and about history. Both his poetry and prose are concerned with men and ideas not of this time. There are historians who bring such men back to life for inspection. But Hill brought them back so that they could judge and condemn the present. He held that historical knowledge and understanding is a major strength of intellect itself. It would be possible to disregard contemporary stupidity, and to attempt to teach the reader with a presentation of historical facts – but his poetry is not a presentation of history, but an involvement in it. As if he were history itself speaking. As if he were history speaking in the present day, in anger. This is not an unreasable position for a poet to take, and it will naturally lead to obscurities in his writing.
I consider that Hill first became a major poet, rather than merely one of the others of his time, with the publication of Canaan. In Macbeth’s anthology, he is set beside Adrian Mitchell, Ian Hamilton, Peter Porter, and Thom Gunn; but none of these could keep up with the seriousness or scale of Canaan.
The first poem of that collection is called ‘To the High Court of Parliament’, and he has made a point of putting the date of composition under the title - November 1994. It is a poem you one can enjoy reading, without knowing exactly what it means. It is clearly a kind of prophetic voice, a poem attacking or condemning Parliament – or ‘The High Court and Parliament’, if there is a distinction. Examining this particular poem, I can express why Hill writes things which I enjoy.
But the aspect of the unnerving isolation is too significant for me to let pass, yet. Hill, as I say, appears to have written for the smallest number of people, if any; and yet was knighted, and was a public figure. That is, his style contradicts his position. The question is, how does it come about, that poetry became dissociated from the public, from public life, to this extent? How did culture get this broken? To deal with Hill’s problem of obscurity of style, is also to deal with this brokenness of our culture, I think.
I want to answer the question of, how this deep, consistent expression of hatred and anger and isolation fulfils the job of the poet. It is appropriate to give examples of this voice in the wilderness at work.
Let us commit that to our dust. What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say,
a sad and angry consolation. That’s
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry
consolation.
(The Triumph of Love, CXLVIII)
There are a few things which it is necessary to get out of the way, regarding Hill’s predecessors. He did not emerge in a vacuum. As a famous poet who worked in total isolation, he was prefigured by Ezra Pound. His style, or his approach to writing poetry, especially later on with the free verse, perhaps most closely resembles that of Pound; the imagist tendances are also obvious. In his word plays, which were always there, the licence he gave himself to engage in talking to himself, and the games of language and ambiguity, there is James Joyce, particularly in Joyce’s Ulysses. In the love of the English land and his expression of it, there is Lawerence, Hardy, and Hopkins. I will trip myself over, and give a spoiler on what follows, if I now point out, that what Hill brings to this pot of influences and precursors, is a serious Christian faith. But more of that later on.
Hill rejects contemporary English culture. We don’t take it personally. I don’t take offense. On the contrary, it seems to be natural to feel this way about our country and our times. His work has value such that you return to it, knowing what to expect, because there is the presence of an intellect turned toward political and cultural things. He is saying something.
But is there a common culture, where we could all agree to this assessment? And if so, are we a culture of individuals, each separate and unhappy, sad and angry about what is going on in England and the West? We enjoy the emotion which is being expressed. By emotion, I mean the loyalty to the country and its history; the sadness.
I feel obliged or anxious about giving a definition of what emotion is. Emotion is the cause of actions, it is the cause of expressions, the cause of feelings, the cause of events active or passive, in a person, which are not derived from the thinking conscious thoughts. Loyalty to country is perhaps a chosen virtue, but it is also an illogical and simply given emotion. People don’t want to let go of their country, and wish to defend it, because they have the emotion of patriotism, for instance. Desire for something or somebody is not usually entirely logical, but is based on what we call emotion, the emotion of sexual love and passion. Defence of the vulnerable, or attacks on the foreign, do not have to be reasonable things, if they are grounded in emotions of pity, horror, or disgust.
Emotions might be thought of as primitive, but this is to suggest that a human being can be without any feeling or any body. Meanwhile, it has been said, that the expression of emotion, or the alignment of feeling with intellect is the actual aim of poetry.
Perhaps, in our age of commodity and control, of universal consumerism, emotion linked to intellect is not welcome or useful. Emotions of passion, patriotism, pity, or horror, are not things useful to a highly organised and controlled society, for the most part.
But we like Hill’s work because we feel instinctively, even when we do not know what he actually intended to mean, that his emotions are for the country, for the people. His mind and the object of his affections is our history. His emotions reach back to love of the past, what came before us. And he as it were speaks from the past, for the past, which is what his vatic, prophetic voice is: history is speaking.
The Great War, and the Second World War, and the Holocaust, each probably more pertinent in the 90s, are each reflected on in the four books. After Canaan, there were three others, which he himself considered to be a single work. They form his magnum opus. Reflecting on the events of the twentieth century brings about his emotional response. Which is why, both in interviews, when pressed to explain his nationalism and conservatism, and in the works themselves, we find that there is a simple question, an emotional question, which stands out. He asks: is this England the reason our ancestors fought and died in the Great War? Is this what they wanted? Is the EU what they wanted, when the Europeans of the past tried to bring about a civil society? Was Parliament supposed to have produced this kind of consumerist and mindless low quality democracy, where virtue and honesty have no place?
You have to ask, whether the consumerist commodity, international society has an emotional ground. If there is no love for country and locality, this is often because the consumer and the socialist or liberal mind is ostensibly focussed on the welfare of other people, and social justice: personal emotion has been off-shored to the charity organisation. There is a suspicion that this dependency on the state is mere idleness and selfishness, where emotional response and intellect has been nationalised by the state; and adherence to impersonal international law. And the consumerist or the lover of mere wealth has entered onto a path of pure automatism and acquisition. What you might call greed. Impersonality and abrogation of self in the name of selfishness, resort to legal rights where conscience ought to operate, is typical of our culture now.
Most poets are conservative; by this I mean, that they do not reject the past. They are not interested in progress or what you might call ‘Whiggery’. The high modernists such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, were conservatives, ultra-conservatives even. After Canaan, Hill set out to complete a sequence, his four books of the magnum opus, which would be a kind of Divine Comedy. To his heaven or paradise, he gave the name of ‘Goldengrove’. Did he achieve his objective of presenting Goldengrove? Did he even intend it as a thing for your consideration, which you could share with him? No he did not. The modernists knew that in a previous age, a poet would set out to present something, a vision, perhaps. But as modernists, while respecting the means and aims of traditional poetry, they found themselves unable to fulfil the ancient demands and imperatives.
In his four books, in despite of the reader's legitimate expectation for a vision of a better world, there is no concrete description of Goldengrove; rather, eclogues of English land and Hill's solitary mind dwelling alone there, contemplating. Toward the end of The Orchards of Syon, he says that the place is neither reality nor illusion.
Even so Goldengrove
Might have been Silvertown, could be Golders Green;
you can’t rule on that. Finis was the last
word to escape me. Period. Stop
trying to amuse with such gleeful sorrow.
Here are the Orchards of Syon, neither wisdom
nor illusion of wisdom, not
compensation, not recompense: the Orchards
of Syon whatever harvests we bring them.
(The Orchards of Syon, LXXII)
It does not exist, then. Something which does not exist is what this age, this culture, deserves, no doubt. At one point, he talks about who else will live there, and the answer is, another person or a stranger might be permitted. But no one in particular. It’s a solitary place. And what of the civil life and the polity? Which is my original question: how can there be a poet in this extremity of exile?
Treat with care
these angry follies of the old monster.
Dig the – mostly uncouth – language of grace.
(ibid, LXIX)
Dante, and some other poets of exile and imprisonment such as Milton, lived on the margins; but they at least provided a kind of model of the City, a description of the good society. Hill not so much. The exile can after all call on the city of heaven as his home and the model. Hill does not do that. But this unwillingness to set out a polity, to describe the kind of society he would prefer to see is clever: where would be the point in making a fictional city – when the answer might be to listen more closely to the promptings of God and history, to wait silently or in solitude for grace? And poetry is concerned with language in itself, with language itself, not with using it to produce fictions and ambitions.
Hill nevertheless did explain his idea of how he would like to see himself among others, how in a time of great distress and stupidity in cultural matters, a man should be. In a Channel Four TV interview of the 1980s, Hill told his interviewer, in defence of his political position, standing outside the mainstream of events, that he is a radical Tory, in the lineage, or looking back toward men such as Richard Oastler. Oastler was prominent in the debates of the 1830s and 1840s. His positions on the major parliamentary events of the time were conservative, or radically so. Against Catholic emancipation, against changes to the franchise or the right to vote; a supporter of the arch Tory, the Duke of Wellington. He was pro-abolition of slavery, and against the New Poor Law, which he saw as cruel. His position is like that of Coleridge on these matters. In favour of Church, it should be said in Coleridge’s case, as against State power; in favour of hierarchy and the land, and natural relations, and against the interference of the government in the life of the nation.
I have made use of Andrew Michael Roberts’ book on Hill (2004), when accounting for the debate which followed this interview, in the London Review of Books and other places. Tom Paulin and others stepped forward and attacked Hill for his conservative politics. Paulin, one of the writers who made a name for himself by commenting on the Troubles and Northern Ireland, said of Hill that his imagination and work was not merely conservative, but practically ‘Blut und Boden’ German National Socialism. It was ‘kitsch feudalism’, ‘nostalgic and reactionary’, a ‘chthonic nationalism’.
Hill replied that his nationalism is nostalgic because England is nostalgic. England longs for itself and to return to hierarchy, authority, tradition, land, and attachment. There is some indication that he thought of his radical Toryism as a result of his particular life circumstances, his social class, his working-class origins. Perhaps the land, the tradition, the natural order of things and the merit earned in working hard to rise within a game of rules and order, are the riches and the inheritance that a working class boy relies on, to give him purpose.
Meanwhile, to the English socialists, the dominant class of Britain since the mid-Seventies, since joining the EEC and going bankrupt, to reformers, to tribunes of the people, to William Cobbett, the reformer, he says:
your righteous unjust and cordial anger,
your singular pitch where labour is spoken of,
your labour that brought to pass
reborn Commodity with uplifted hands
awed by its own predation.
(‘To William Cobbett: In absentia’, from Canaan)
The reforming zeal of English historical activity has turned into mere consumerism and commodity worship.
Men like Tom Paulin claimed to be disgusted by nationalism, feudalism, and conservatism. I suppose they looked to 'the future', a science fiction world, and the EU, as most people did and still do, these days. And, in response, about the EU, with a poem in memory of Hans-Bernd von Haeften, a conspirator in the plot to kill Hitler, Hill says.
Could none predict these haughty degradations
as now your high-strung
martyred resistance serves
to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht?
(‘De jure belli ac pacis’, from Canaan)
So. Not convinced by the virtue of Parliament, nor of the EU.
The twist in the story was reported on in the Guardian in 2016, the year in which Hill died. Hill’s last interview, to the joy of the obituarists, contains comments on Brexit. The burden of his statement being that there was nothing left of England, and that leaving the EU was the vote or the work of Britannia with a big bum, the activity and voting decision of failed Hobbits. Hill was a remainer, apparently.
I suppose Hill’s angry response to our age is, the anger of England’s history rising from the grave and not recognising the place. It is a land and a people whose chief ideology and vision seems to be science fiction, after all. But this still doesn’t account for the strangeness, the horrific situation, of a man who was knighted in 2012, became Oxford Professor of Poetry, and was known across the world, surviving into his eighties, who never moved from the position that the country he loved was ruined and doomed; how he resorted to monologues and an almost total condemnation of his own contemporary culture – and was not mad, but believed himself to be justified in doing so. Still, there is a relatively easy way of understanding this paradox.
--
What I have tried to say so far is maybe no more than an introduction. There is a type of criticism of poetry which expounds and describes, and then there is a type which says something new, something personal. I have tried to show that Geoffrey Hill was interested in political activity and ideas, taking his inspiration from history, as a conservative. That’s not very informative, if we already have read his work. More interesting, when doing criticism or writing about Hill, would be to reveal the secretive or concealed logic inside the poems, which distinguishes them from the interviews, the political statements, the expressions of the man in the street. I locate that in his ‘religion’.
Here is a sample from the first piece of his early work selected by George Macbeth for the anthology ‘British Poetry 1900 to 1975’:
Against the burly air I strode,
Where the tight ocean heaves its load,
Crying the miracles of God.
[…]
By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.
And by Christ’s blood are men made free […]
(‘Genesis’, in Collected Poems)
I think that the man who wrote this is the same one who wrote the words to the High Court of Parliament; these are the words of a man with an orthodox or classic faith in God, the Christian God. It is easy to forget that the long poem on Charles Peguy published in 1984, is concerned with Peguy as a nationalist and political figure, rather than a religious poet. It seems as if Hill forgot, or did not deem it necessary to emphasise what Peguy himself thought so important, that Peguy was a convert from Socialism to Catholic Christianity. Peguy was a Christian mystic and theologian in his poetry.
I wish here to discuss Hill’s Christian faith; its expression in his poems is not straightforward. Unlike Peguy, Hill did not write theological works, nor express his belief in a blatant naïve way. The two of them are similar, however, in being conservative nationalists, who wrote Christian poetry. It was said by T.S. Eliot, not long after Peguy’s death (in The New Statesman and Nation in 1916), that Peguy would not be remembered, if he had not died in the battle of the Marne, aged 41. Eliot meant, that as poetry, Peguy’s work is not first rate. But we can leave that particular judgement to one side. The point is, Peguy was a religious nationalist poet.
In the case of Hill, the inspiration of his work might be the same as those of Peguy; but Hill’s poetry is valued on its own merits: they share the same outlook, but they have a different style. We do not remember Hill because he died in battle. He achieved nothing, dying of old age just after the Brexit vote; he had worked as a university lecturer and a professor in England and the United States. He had an obituary in the Guardian, and was knighted in 2012. So much, so ordinary.
From the time when his poem on Peguy was written and published, he released nothing until 1996, a break of nearly ten years. There then followed the four books which I have been discussing above. He gave up iambic and rhymed verse when he began to write again. Canaan is the first of those books; the other three do no more than to comment on its themes; they in general resolve the problems it raised. Canaan poses the problem, and the other books try to deal with the same problem in different voices, different ways.
Here are the themes of Canaan, as it seems to me. First of all, there are those three poems entitled ‘To the High Court of Parliament’ written in November 1994. Then there are four entitled ‘Mysticism and Democracy’. There are several addressed to dead European artists and politicians, mostly English, which have a kind of subtitle ‘: In Absentia’. What catches my eye is the prominent position given to poems dealing with the definition or understanding of what morality and virtue are. And there is the eponymous poem ‘ Canaan’. These repeated headings are the skeleton of the collection.
This is political poetry, and it is religious poetry. It is at any rate, poetry inspired by his political and religious cultural unrest. There’s a simple point to be made here: the poetry is Christian and Anglican political judgement on the era of the mid-1990s. There is a meaning to these works, and that meaning is unhappiness with the ruling class, and unhappiness with the people, and both of them are chiefly characterised by their irreligion.
The poems which are addressed to the High Court of Parliament are concerned with virtue. The first line of the collection asks:
Where’s the probity in this –
the slither frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?
Elsewhere, in person, Hill spoke of the Tories of his own time, as a political party or class which was ‘a rabble and an oligarchy’. That may be so. But this word ‘probity’, and his use of words of this kind in his poetry, seem to me to provoke us to ask: what then is probity? Or, what is virtue? Or honesty?
It should be accepted, given the title of the book, and his certainty that there must be an answer to the question about ‘probity’, that Hill does rely on a transcendent and immovable standard against which to measure Parliament, and to understand what virtue is. That standard is the perfect honesty and the immovable righteousness of God. When he says that every member of parliament lacks probity, he means that they are each ignorant and evasive before God. They behave without morals, because they believe that God is not watching them.
For, in our culture it is taken for granted, that there is nothing which cannot be given an explanation and an excuse; you don’t need to be tested and proven: there are always excuses. Hill approaches the behaviour of Parliament, and does not allow any excuses. Political men and the rest do wrong – but against what standard? The implicit answer must be, against the standard of the Chosen People, working and taking possession of Canaan, under the guidance of God. There is no inherent blame or shame in Parliament, or the Tory Party being called a ‘rabble and an oligarchy’, unless we measure them by the standard of what God and Christ would accept, which is what Hill considers to be the applicable standard.
In the poems which follow (‘Whether the virtues are emotions’, and ‘Whether moral virtue comes by habituation’), if I read them correctly, he shows how merely human action degenerates toward death, and the mere movement of the earth toward its entropic end. While old age and idleness might be stillness and the absence of vice, they are not active virtue. The poem titled ‘Canaan’ is a direct description of German or English soldiers marching through Flanders, and destroying themselves, and everything in their path – in order to establish peace; it is iniquity and rectitude mixed, an image of a Godless virtue. I would suppose that this is the way in which Europe has behaved, without the guidance of the law and the prophets.
He is judging what he sees by the standard and expectations of God and the scriptures. It would be a common response, in our era, to reply with the the boast of ‘democracy’. Democracy has or does defeat God, you could say. Hill has three poems called ‘Mysticism and Democracy’, which respond to this, what has become a universal belief and an occasion for pride. Against the accusation that our culture is dead or vicious, we habitually reflect, that this may be the case, but nevertheless, we are a democratic culture. I think my interpretation of his meaning is correct, when I say that Hill denies that democracy has done what it pretends to do.
Do not stand witness; observe only
natures and polities aligned with rectitude
yet not of it;
commonweal their lodestar, inordinate
and thrusting dominion their enterprise;
purposed ambition not to be confined
by reason of defect.
I take it that he means, where democratic systems promise common happiness, they deliver in fact control and lordship and enterprise; they are set up to do good, but do not do good, or right. What ambition there is, has no interest in whether the ambitions are defective. The reason he has called these poems ‘Mysticism and Democracy’, is because ‘Democracy’ has, for most minds, and in practice, become a mystical religion which can do no wrong. It is a materialistic mysticism, and renders the land a shadow land, a land of the dead.
The copper clouds
are not of the light;
Lambeth is no more
the house of the lamb.
[…]
Speak now regardless
judges of the hour:
what verdict, what people?
Hem of whose garment?
Whose Jerusalem –
at usuance for its bones’
redemption and last
salvo of poppies?
(‘Churchill’s Funeral’, in Canaan)
But it was too obvious and therefore too useless to have spoken in plain English. If democracy is itself the problem, then why have a democratic style, one that everyone can understand? Or, if he choses to break things down to a level where anyone can understand what he means, then the writer is estranged from his own thoughts. The style of absolute clarity is also the objective style of no longer being honest about how you feel, it’s no longer expression, but explanation.
Poetry, after all, is emotional and virtuous honest expression. A sad and angry consolation. A man’s style is a reflection of his soul, of his whole personality. And Hill does not belong to the deceived, self-deceiving mass and elite, which is the ruined culture of England. He expresses himself as honestly and coherently as he can, but using words as they were meant to be used by a Christian.
There is an opposite style to that of obscurity and ambiguity; such a style of absolute transparency of lexicon and grammar, and absolute faith in God, can be presented as poetry, as bald statement of a problem. Here is a spoof version of such a style by Peter Reading, in the collection Stet of 1986.
[‘Contented of Telford, Mrs’ submits her poem
‘Faith’ to the Editor.]
All this terrible rape and murder
And mugging and violence galore
And poor little children beaten
Oh! My heart can stand no more.
There is always someone on strike
For better pay and terms,
Is there no end of this misery?
No one every learns.
But before despair descends
Upon my sad head
A name crops up in the paper
And I no longer wish I was dead!
I’m filled with fresh, new hope,
I’m certain that Billy Graham,
With words of Truth and Love,
Will bring an end to this horrid mayhem.
(Peter Reading, Collected Poems 1985-1996, Vol. 2, p. 101)
This spoof serves as an example of direct speech and feeling, on a democratic and culturally basic English level. I believe that there is a place for this kind of work and this kind of expression in the contemporary ‘Woke’ movement; we find many examples of this kind of poetry in the Poetry Review journal. There is no chance of any misunderstanding what this poem means, nor what the solution it proposes, is. It's not poetry but a sort of basic English democratic statement of fact.
Hill’s style is the one where a man does not directly reveal his faith; rather, the faith motivates how he uses language, and how he expresses himself; he uses words as if they were eternal concepts stamped by God. Style and faith work together. Faith is a private event at all times. And the works of faith which are the style of a man’s writing, are idiosyncratic, difficult. It is appropriate for a mystic or a saint to refer continually to God as the source and end of everything, and this is true. But this does not make poetry, nor is it how life has to be lived, nor how language is used, from day to day, in a civic or other sort of life. Hill’s style, notoriously difficult, could be described as a man talking to atheists while holding his dearest beliefs in reserve, so as to make his faith survive and get to work in such society.