geoffrey hill in america

1 4 5R

P O E T R Y I N

R E V I E W

J U S T I N

Q U I N N

One could be forgiven for mixing up the authors of the followingtwo passages. The first is from one of Geo√rey Hill’s earliestpoems, dating from 1952, ‘‘Genesis’’:

Against the burly air I strodeCrying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bearUpon the dead weight of the land;And the waves flourished at my prayer,The rivers spawned their sand.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And I renounced, on the fourth day,This fierce and unregenerate clay,Building as a huge myth for manThe watery Leviathan,

S p e e c h ! S p e e c h ! by Geo√rey Hill (Counterpoint, 80 pp., $23)

1 4 6 Q U I N N

Y

And made the long-winged albatrossScour the ashes of the seaWhere Capricorn and Zero cross,A brooding immortality – Such as the charmed phoenix hasIn the unwithering tree.

Although the speaker declares that it is God’s miracles he cries, itwould appear from the strong indicatives that follow that it is thespeaker himself who wields power: he tames the sea and buildsmyths for humankind. The air might be burly, but the implicationis that the speaker is even burlier if he can stride through it withsuch confidence. His is a demiurgic power that has within itspurview the length and breadth of the world. The speaker doesrepeat in the poem that the world is God’s work, but he is also atthe same time intoxicated by the vistas of potency that he hasglimpsed.

The second passage is by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a journalentry for 2 November 1822, age nineteen, just a year younger thanHill when he wrote ‘‘Genesis’’:

I believe we fight against phantoms when we laboriouslycontend for the surpassing power of God. It is that attribute,the proofs of which are most gross and undeniable, in theview of every being to whom that Power has communicatedthe organs of sense. Does the man wake who doubts it? Hathhe an eye and an ear, touch and smell? I recommend to himto turn his face to the East and see the sun; to look at thelight, what it is? to climb the everlasting hills; to go whereDeep calleth unto Deep and find the fountains of the sea; toopen his ears to the thunder, and his eye to the fire of thecloud; and if his fastidious soul find amid these, instancesrather of decay & weakness than of power, why I will bid thisover-proud worm estimate the force which is here requiredin these ordinary phenomena; I will bid him make trial of hisstength [sic] and compare it if he durst with Omnipotence.Put forth now thine arm and arrest the fierce comet in hisjourney to the sun. Like Joshua bid the sun stand still inGideon & the Moon in the valley of Ajalon. Pluck out a worldfrom yon wilderness of stars, and extinguish its light forever.

P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 4 7

R

In vain. They all move serenely on, looking down from theirimmeasurable height with pity upon the insolent reptile. Letthe hand that sustains the Universe for a moment be with-drawn – wilt thou put thy shoulder to the Centre and supportthe falling worlds? No they stand and move by higher forceswhich thy little will is not able to hinder or supply; no, not toconceive. Creep into thy grave, for the Universe hath no needof thee; Omnipotence is planted for its preservation.

It would seem that Emerson o√ers a rebuke to Hill’s poem, that is,for Hill’s belief that he has access to divine power, a belief thatEmerson himself was already formulating and would later crystal-lize in the tenets of Transcendentalism. That movement in Ameri-can culture would proclaim that individuals can and should arro-gate power to themselves and make the world anew in preciselythe way Hill describes in ‘‘Genesis’’: ‘‘Build therefore your ownworld,’’ Emerson would instruct the reader fourteen years later atthe end of Nature. Read in the context of his journal and lateressays, the passage above is untypical of Emerson, just as Hill’spoem is untypical of his subsequent work, which reacts forcefullyagainst the Antinomian tradition. I wish to look here at how Hillresists the American ideology of Emerson individualism in hispoetry and see what this can tell us, first, about Hill’s work and,more briefly, about some of the general di√erences between Brit-ish and American poetry over the past few decades. If we are totrust the division in academic criticism, it would seem that thesenow represent separate traditions; even so, there is a commonlanguage and, indeed, a common heritage. Hill rejects contexturein both contemporary scenes and yet in complex ways engages themain traditions.

Emerson insists that divinity is available directly to the individualthrough personal experience and does not have to be mediatedthrough the codes and protocols of an ecclesiastical or politicalinstitution. Part of this stance is an aggressive jettisoning of thepast if it does not seem to the individual to be immediately usefulin the process of his or her development. Perhaps the most famousaccount of the movement of secular grace is found at the begin-ning of Nature as Emerson is walking across a heath at night and

1 4 8 Q U I N N

Y

states that ‘‘I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all;the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I ampart or parcel of God.’’ Although this individualism has increas-ingly come under attack for temporizing in a philosophical veinwhile social issues such as slavery went unaddressed, its e√ective-ness in replacing the feudal European system and providing thebasis for democratic ideology is patent. As a result of this keyposition in the American social structure, it has remained a potentmyth in American literature, important for later writers as diverseas Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Jorie Graham. For these, anindividual’s moments of ecstatic vision, set o√ from the regularpunctuation of Cartesian time, are valorized, questioned, andsometimes acted upon, occasionally with felicitous results, as inGinsberg’s ‘‘Kral Majales,’’ or ruinous ones, as in the case of HarryAngstrom at the end of Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

Emerson himself was well aware of the ‘‘self complacency aris-ing from having thought so nobly for a moment,’’ but the lure ofthat ‘‘fine exhilaration which now & then quickens my clay’’ wasstronger than his scruples. The di√erence then between Emersonand Hill is in strength of scruple. Hill, like Emerson, is forcefullyattracted to the individual’s moment of privileged vision, but be-cause he cannot be sure that it is in fact grace and not a self-fabricated delight, he retreats from it and turns instead to thosereligious and social values that have been transmitted over manygenerations in England, and also to the institutions that havearisen as a result of those beliefs and allegiances. So ubiquitous isthe Emersonian ideology even beyond the shores of America thatour contemporary tendency is to view such a turn as somehowcowardly, a soporific conservatism that is incapable of change andinnovation. Artistic and other types of genius must involve a rejec-tion of tradition or, as Richard Poirier, one of Emerson’s finestexpositors, has it, ‘‘Precisely at the point when ‘genius’ entershistory, when it o√ers itself as text, it becomes for Emersonblurred or ensnared.’’ The problem here is that Emersonianismcannot imagine modes of genius that are, first, not fueled by ec-static moments of individual vision, second, are mediated throughsocial modes, and third, nevertheless are genuinely radical in theirsocial critique. In the American context, rejection of Emersoni-anism usually comes as part of multicultural discourse, which in


R

its rejection of Euro-American tradition and – in some of its man-ifestations, especially Native American criticism – its valorizationof nature and ecstatic modes of awareness experienced there, owesmore to the father of Transcendentalism than it would like toadmit. It is clearly a case of the Emersonian tradition adaptingitself to new terrain.

To this Hill retorts: ‘‘The manna of inspiration is nothing morethan an inspired manner.’’ References to Emerson and Emersoni-anism are found throughout his poetry and critical prose. A recentexample is in a review of Early Responses to Hobbes in The Times

Literary Supplement in 1999, where Hill refers disparagingly ‘‘thepersonalist authenticity of Emerson and the Emersonians.’’ Thereference is particularly surprising because it comes at the begin-ning of a long review-article, the terms of reference of which arealmost exclusively seventeenth-century. In the collection pub-lished the year before, The Triumph of Love (1998), Hill o√ers alonger gloss:

If I were to grasp once, in emulation,work of the absolute, origin-creating mind,its opus est, conclusiveotherness, the veilof certitude discovered as itselfthat which is to be revealed,I should hold for my own, my self-giving,my retort upon Emerson’s ‘‘alienated majesty,’’the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine.

Bradwardine was the archbishop of Canterbury who refuted theheresy of Pelagianism, which denied the transmission of originalsin. Here Pelagius stands as an ur-Emerson, ‘‘ignorant [and] as-sured’’ in his ‘‘blind ennoblement’’ of humanity. Emerson empha-sizes the value of the individual, and that for Hill is a form ofirresponsible surrender. In an earlier essay he refers approvingly toJohn Dryden’s description of ‘‘the chaos in the individual mind, ‘aconfus’d Mass of Thoughts, tumbling over one another in theDark,’ which is what inspiration is before its elements are ‘eitherchosen or rejected by the Judgement’ ’’; and another endorsedquotation from Dryden is a reference to a ‘‘ ‘disagreeable youngperson expressing its haedinus egotism,’ ’’ haedinus being Latin for

1 5 0 Q U I N N

Y

a young goat. In his latest collection, Speech! Speech! the contemptis more open and hectoring:

Can’t you read English? Whatdo I meán by praise-songs? I could weep.Thís is a praise-song. These are songs of praise.Shall I hyphenate-fór-you? Syntaxis a dead language, your incoherencethe volatility of a dead age – vintage Brook Farm, adulterate founders’ bin;and yoú the faex Rómuli | the dregs.authentic self a stinker; pass it on,nasum in ano | the contagious circles.

The Transcendentalist social experiment of Brook Farm was lo-cated at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, coincidentally (or perhapsnot) a short distance from where Hill lives now in Brookline.References to an ‘‘authentic self ’’ and ‘‘circles’’ clearly point toEmerson, and Emerson’s ideology is a kind of mental contagion.Emerson’s mysticism is ‘‘incoherence’’ and his followers are ‘‘thedregs,’’ and here this is not the lees but faeces (the excrementof Rome), which is confirmed by the schoolboy snigger of thenext line.

This suggests that Hill’s work is best characterized by retreatfrom ecstatic vision; in its place he would seem to o√er immersionin history and tradition, and the radical social and cultural critiqueof these matters. He talks of how ‘‘the individual poetic voice can,and must, realize its own power amid, and indeed out of, thatworldly business which makes certain desires and ambitions un-realizable.’’ This is the challenge he o√ers to the Emersonianideology. Further, I contend, the direction that Hill’s poetry hastaken is influenced as much by his rejection of Emerson as by hisconsideration of English history and tradition. The Emersonianmoment of ecstasis calls strongly to Hill, and resisting it has beenan important shaping force on his poetry. His work, then, is gen-uinely reactionary, for it refuses the lure of what he sees as self-delighting Antinomianism. However, he not only resists but re-torts, and the challenge is intricate and considered.

It might be objected that what I call Emersonianism here is infact a more general form of Romanticism that is found in a range


R

of works of art and literature, not least in the poetry of WilliamWordsworth, of whom Hill has written appreciatively. It is ofinterest, then, to see how in his appraisal of Wordsworth, Hillacknowledges his ‘‘spots of time’’ but approves only of his ability tomediate these through reason: ‘‘His creative gift was to transformthe helpless reiterations of raw encounter into the ‘obstinate ques-tionings’ of his meditated art without losing the sense of rawness.’’Without that ‘‘meditated art’’ Wordsworth would remain what wemight call Emersonian and uncooked. But because he strove todiscern the meaning of such moments within the context of hislife (and also in the context of revolutionary Europe), he winsHill’s praise. And again we can see the axis at work: Hill wantsboth ‘‘meditated art’’ and ‘‘the sense of rawness.’’ Of the poem‘‘Elegiac Stanzas: On a Visit to Dove Cottage,’’ from For the Un-

fallen (1959), which confronts Wordsworth’s ‘‘rawness’’ (‘‘Moun-tains, rivers, and grand storms, / Continuous profit, grand cus-toms / (And many of them): O Lakes, Lakes! / O Sentiment uponthe rocks!’’), David Gervais has accurately commented that ‘‘it isnot easy to tell how far this o√ers a critique of Wordsworth andhow far it expresses regret (like Arnold’s) for things Wordsworthcould do and that Hill cannot.’’ One wants to say that it expressesboth.

The first part of this challenge questions the authenticity of themoment of ecstatic vision: How can one be sure of its source, thatit is in fact the movement of God’s grace through one’s heart andnot a delusion of one’s wish-fulfillment? This is the implication ofHill’s somewhat defensive statement in an overview: ‘‘If criticsaccuse me of evasiveness or the vice of nostalgia, or say that I seemincapable of grasping true religious experience, I would answerthat the grasp of true religious experience is a privilege reservedfor very few, and that one is trying to make lyric poetry out of amuch more common situation – the sense of not being able tograsp true religious experience.’’ The word ‘‘grasp’’ here is ambiv-alent in important ways: first, it conveys a degree of aggression inthe appropriation of religious experience – an unsalutary lack ofnegative capability that Hill disdains; second, in its other meaning,it implies that although Hill might indeed be capable of religiousexperience, he cannot understand it; third, it may mean that hecannot understand it, let alone experience it. No matter which

1 5 2 Q U I N N

Y

construction one chooses, his accusation remains acute: some art-ists are too ready to work themselves up into states of ecstasy andare content with ersatz grace instead of waiting (perhaps in vain)for the real thing. In Hill’s praise of Robert Southwell, this rejec-tion is evident: ‘‘For Southwell to have ‘lost himself ’ merely in apoem would have required more self-centredness than he wascapable of. This keenly witty man was so properly sceptical of‘fancie’ and ‘selfe delight’ employed all the resources of his wit tomoderate between grace and peril in this most dangerous area ofthe religious life.’’ Rather than abandoning human reason to ap-prehend the spiritual, we must exercise all our powers of discrimi-nation and intellectual recognition most strenuously in the sphereof religion; otherwise we leave ourselves open to self-deceptionand, indeed, to danger. This latter carries with it a whi√ of an ear-lier age in Europe when people were executed for their religiousbeliefs, as Southwell was. In this context, the Emersonian valori-zation of moments of revelation that the individual experiences isa heretical sequel to Jacob Boehm, threatening as it does thetransmission of true religious belief from generation to genera-tion. Hill has often been accused of anachronism (Mercian Hymns

[1971] is a triumph in this mode), and it is clear that he thinks andargues about the issues of religion as if they held the same socialimportance as they did in Southwell’s time, which they clearly donot, at least for most Americans and Britons. But whereas in otherhands such anachronism would be a redoubt of the imagination,with Hill it sends him out into the world into a full engagementwith British and European history in the twentieth century. Theterms of this engagement are necessarily deprecatory, a prayingagainst a world that has lost all apprehension of the choices that aman like Robert Southwell faced.

The kind of danger Hill talks about is di√erent from that whichfulfilled itself in the lives of certain American poets in the mid-twentieth century, among them Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, JohnBerryman, and Sylvia Plath. Their particular development ofAmerican individualism stressed extreme autobiographical reve-lation, for which they seemingly paid a price:

The major Romanticism of our time, or that which somepropound as the major Romanticism, sees the poet’s vocation


R

as a ‘‘searching for a way of reconciling human vision withthe energies, powers, presences, of the non-human cosmos.’’Charles Olson has described the poem as a ‘‘high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.’’ In suchcase the ‘‘menace’’ of poetry may be taken as referring notonly to the ‘‘energy’’ which is to be released, at whatever cost,but also to the inevitable fatalities occurring in any high-riskoccupation. In my thesis, however, the idea of ‘‘menace’’ isentirely devoid of sublimity: it is meanly experiential ratherthan grandly mythical.

That ‘‘meanly experiential’’ chimes with the ‘‘more common sit-uation’’ he refers to in the interview: life and poetry based not onecstatic revelation but on something more mundane and perhapsless ‘‘poetic,’’ are more authentic and have more purchase on howthings are and how history works. Again, the implication of Hill’stone here is that heroism and true energy discharges are not evenpresent in the poetry of Olson – that is just poetic fireworks – buton a di√erent level altogether, that is a world of ‘‘ ‘ordinary cir-cumstances,’ ‘habitudes and institutions,’ ‘cultivated opinion,’ ‘tra-ditional pieties and naïve beliefs,’ what Locke termed ‘the audiblediscourse of the company’ and Austin designated as ‘the conduct ofmeetings and business.’ ’’

Not much to get worked up about there. This suggests a poetryof memos and paperclips, but it is important to gauge here how farHill exaggerates the values of his own poetic practice. When weturn to the poems, we see a di√erent pattern generating itself outof the debate. ‘‘Genesis,’’ given in part above, is the first poem inFor the Unfallen, Hill’s first collection, and thus occupies a signifi-cant position. Its statement in the first-person indicative stronglyrecalls Emerson’s moment of ecstatic vision in Nature: power isarrogated to the speaking subject as he arranges the entire earthabout himself. But in subsequent poems there is a falling o√ fromthis zenith. The following poem, ‘‘God’s Little Mountain,’’ beginsby describing the landscape below the mountain peak (mountainpeaks being traditionally associated with Romantic visionary mo-ments, as well as in the Bible being locations where the waysof God were revealed to certain men). The speaker, who hasjust experienced what Hill in his prose disparagingly calls the

1 5 4 Q U I N N

Y

‘‘euphoric state’’ or perhaps genuine apprehension of Godhead, isbemused by his change in state, and he says:

[I] fell, until I found the world again.Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;For though the head frames words the tongue has none.

‘‘Grace’’ is what presumably he had a surfeit of on the mountain-top, and now he has none; or perhaps he requires a di√erent kindof grace to communicate what he has seen. In either case thespeaker faces the impossibility of sharing his experience withanyone, and thus the impossibility of giving it meaning in theworld of ‘‘meetings and business.’’ Whereas in his criticism, Hillresponds to such moments with suspicion, here they awaken apainful feeling of loss.

Three poems on, the speaker is still working out the implica-tions of the fall from the moment of vision in ‘‘Genesis’’:

The starched unbending candles stirAs though a wind had caught their hair,As though the surging of a hostHad charged the air of Pentecost.And I believe in the spurred flame,Those racing tongues, but cannot comeOut of my heart’s unbroken room;Nor feel the lips of fire amongThe cold light and the chilling song,The broken mouths that spill their hoardOf prayer like beads on to a board.

That we have entered the fallen world is marked by the institu-tional space of religious devotion (that is, the candles); moreover,the speaker is in the business of working out his religious beliefs inreference to other people (their ‘‘racing tongues’’ and ‘‘brokenmouths’’), no longer, as in the earlier two poems, involved ina direct relation with God. And now the Pentecostal experienceis removed by the ‘‘as though,’’ as if the speaker is beginningto doubt his own faculty of memory. He says he ‘‘believe[s] inthe spurred flame’’ (my emphasis), not that he knows its force.Whereas ‘‘Genesis’’ was instinct with the expansive force of revela-tion, this is the poetry of doubt that will later lead to retraction.


R

What follows in For the Unfallen are poems such as ‘‘The TurtleDove’’ and ‘‘The Troublesome Reign’’ that negotiate the relationsbetween lovers, as if to say that this represents the phase afterreligious revelation – earthly love as substitute for proximity toGodhead; and after this Hill turns his gaze to history in poems like‘‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’’ and ‘‘Two Formal Elegies:For the Jews in Europe.’’ That these historical considerations arestill animated by the earlier vision is marked in, for instance, thefirst part of the second poem, when he states: ‘‘This world wentspinning from Jehovah’s hand.’’ This has two meanings: first, thatthe world still moves along the trajectory given it by God, andtherefore within that destiny, no matter what atrocities are com-mitted; second, that the world has spun out of God’s control.Rather than providing a secure frame of eschatological referencewith which to grasp the fate of the Jews in Europe, Hill, in thisambiguous line, simultaneously expresses hope for the redeemingpresence of God’s grace and despair at having lost access to it. Inhis discussion of parenthesis in the poetry, Christopher Ricks ana-lyzes this contrapuntal gesture:

[Hill] knows that any device of language is an axis, not adirection. The very thing which may do such-and-such maydo its opposite. So it must be added that, though it is true thatthe unsayableness of a typographical sign like a bracklet maytruly embody a recognition of the morally, spiritually andpolitically unspeakable, it is no less true that this very un-speakableness may choose exactly the same form: a voicelessand dehumanized ‘‘language,’’ denying the warm humanityof the voice and steeling its cold eye.

Despite this danger, Hill continues with such an ‘‘axial’’ employ-ment of his poetic gift, opting for contrapuntal voicing rather thanthe forceful indicatives of ‘‘Genesis.’’ What animates the poetry,then, is the struggle of scruple against the desire for ecstasis. In thelulls of the contest, we are vouchsafed brief, strange visions:

The scummed pond twitches. The great holly-tree,Emptied and shut, blows clear of wasting snow,The common, puddled substance: beneath,Like a revealed mineral, a new earth.

1 5 6 Q U I N N

Y

The holly is loaded with symbolic meaning, which it is emptied ofand then shut like a book. We are left with something mundane,‘‘The common, puddled substance,’’ reminding us of the ‘‘commonsituation’’ mentioned earlier. This commonness gives onto ‘‘a newearth,’’ but it must be a di√erent kind of novelty than that prom-ised by Emerson when he exhorted his readers to listen to thevoices of their own selves. And indeed the tone is very di√erent:there is nothing of the ecstatic about it – a half-rhyme and aspondee bringing the poem to a solemn close. Hill’s newness in-volves a paradoxical return to the past and traditions of polity andecclesia.

In moving now to Canaan (1996), I pass over several collections,notably Mercian Hymns, which most critics feel to be Hill’s best.The richly imaginative anachronisms and oblique autobiographymake it perhaps his most engaging book, not to mention one of hisfunniest. In terms of my argument the book represents one epi-sode in Hill’s attempt to resist the valorization of the individual byimbricating it in English history. But the result is curious. InMercian Hymns, Hill, unlike Emerson, does turn to history, butrather than projecting his poetic persona on, say, some insignifi-cant peasant, he chooses O√a, a powerful Anglo-Saxon king, astrange move for a poet who commented not long ago that he is‘‘glad and proud of being born into the English working class.’’Not a suppression of the individual ego, this might seem to be agrotesque and unwarranted aggrandizement of it. Usurpers tothrones at that time in England occasionally had to fictionalizetheir genealogy to cooperfasten their position. As one historian hasit: ‘‘A successful usurper might graft his line onto the royal geneal-ogy at a point so remote that no one could dispute the claim; or hemight come to be believed to have divine descent because he wassuccessful.’’ Hill then appears in a similar light to such usurpers,only in his case the criterion is imaginative and not political suc-cess. In the terms of Hill’s own position, the book seems to be anabuse of tradition, a piece of ‘‘fancie’’ and ‘‘selfe delight,’’ instead ofa considered engagement with the past. In a note, he admits it tobe an ‘‘unscholarly and fantastic’’ work. In the struggle of scruplewith expansive desire, Mercian Hymns represents the faltering ofthe former. Hill once approvingly cited the philosopher T. H.


R

Green thus: ‘‘ ‘It may very well happen that the desire whicha√ects a man most strongly is one which he decides on resisting.’ ’’This failure of 1971 sets o√ the active resistance of the 1996 collec-tion all the more.

Canaan begins and ends with poems addressed ‘‘To the HighCourt of Parliament,’’ both dated November 1994, when the cor-ruption of the Conservative Party after a long period in power wascoming to the surface, especially in the money-for-questions scan-dal. The second of the poems was published in the same month inthe TLS – these poems are what critical discourse now calls ‘‘inter-ventions.’’ Hill is commonly seen as having little to do with thepresent state of things in Britain. The critic Sean O’Brien entitledan essay on Hill, ‘‘The England Where Nobody Lives,’’ implying inthe course of it that the poet is more involved with English spec-ters of his own making than with the real thing (‘‘the successfulinstances [in the poetry] seem more like the product of a kind ofchildhood fetishism than a mature historical vision’’). O’Brien’sessay does not consider Canaan – the stern satirical reproof of thebook’s opening, as well as pouring invective on corrupt politicians,curtly overturns his take on the poet:

Where’s probity in this – the slither-frisk

to lordship of a kindas rats to a bird-table?

England – now of geniusthe eidolon –

unsubstantial yet voidingsubstance like quicklime:

privatize to the deadher memory:

let her wounds weepinto the lens of oblivion.

In much contemporary British poetry, ideas of English traditionare invoked in order to relish the process of their disappearance.This is done either with the talent and intelligence of Tony Har-

1 5 8 Q U I N N

Y

rison’s early work or with the mechanical ironies of lesser lights. Inany case, no other poet than Hill will call up the idea of Englishtradition as foil for attending to the present state of things, as hedoes here. The first stanza is censorious, but what is most strikingis the tone: it bespeaks authority but also a melancholic despera-tion. He deplores contemporaneous events as would a left-leaningcommentator, but he does so from a position that honors tradition.In this he is more conservative than the Conservatives, who withtheir talk of tradition wish only to conserve their own privilegesand power; and insofar as he refuses to let go of the roots andinheritance of the English constitutional tradition he is more radi-cal than the left. The line ‘‘privatize to the dead’’ perhaps refers tothe sale for the sum of one pound of a cemetery in Westminster,with the company that made the purchase later accused of mis-handling the remains. This image evokes one of the central ideasof the collection: the entailed riches of English tradition thrownon the slagheap by an oblivious present. This provokes Hill’s angerand – what is less commented on – grief. Again, to many thismight seem like nostalgia, a wallowing in ideas of the past at theexpense of attention to the present, but it is nostalgia only in theroot sense of the longing for the journey home. It is a nostalgiathat is fully engaged in the present and fully aware of the dangersof forgetfulness. As David Bromwich writes: ‘‘There are uniquemodern ways in which the loss of the past may liberate. But thedestruction of memory has always been a weapon of tyranny, aweapon that by coincidence it shares with competitive technologi-cal capitalism.’’ Cultural and political reinvention of a nation ispossible only by evolving within tradition. The challenge o√eredto this by Emersonianism is that such conservatism leads to badfaith, to the falsification of public expression of private feelingsand convictions. Nevertheless, a nation that places most signifi-cance on the individual will have no social adhesive to join itsatoms.

What is also exceptional about Canaan is its ability to movefrom the mode of what might be termed ‘‘nostalgic satire’’ tomatters of the spirit. The title of the next poem in the booksuggests a very di√erent term of reference, ‘‘That Man as RationalAnimal Desires the Knowledge Which Is His Perfection’’:


R

Abiding provenance I would have saidthe question stands

even in adorationclause upon clause

with or without assentreason and desire on the same loop – I imagine singing I imagine

getting it right – the knowledgeof sensuous intelligence

entering into the work – spontaneous happiness as it was oncegiven our sleeping nature to awake by

and knowinnocence of the first inscription

‘‘The knowledge / of sensuous intelligence’’ is an accurate descrip-tion of the moment of ‘‘Genesis’’; this continues to haunt Hill’smemory. ‘‘Abiding provenance’’ is pitched in opposition to theamnesic present – that is, a custodianship of the ideals of polity –but it is also a retrospective thought: in other words, had circum-stances allowed he would have asserted ‘‘abiding provenance,’’ butin fact did not. One presumes that ‘‘the question’’ of the secondline is that raised by the title: this is to say that although suchperfection is unattainable, continuing to inquire after it is a formof moral maintenance. And on the face of it, these inquiries arefueled by what Hill in his prose deplores. For instance, referring toSouthwell’s Humble Supplication and Thomas Campion’s ‘‘Chal-lenge’’ and remarking on the speed and passion with which theywere written, he comments: ‘‘but one would hesitate to call suchwords ‘spontaneous e√usions.’ They have nothing in common withthat facile ‘self-expression’ which so debases the current accep-tance of ‘spontaneity.’ Such ease and rapidity as they manifest arethe issue of years of arduous rhetorical and meditational exercise,both classical and Ignatian.’’ This is no straightforward dismissalof ‘‘self-expression’’ but rather a statement that before the selfexpresses itself it must be ready, must be primed, so that spon-taneity will be sinewed with intelligence, at once passionate andconsidered. It is a rejection of the Emersonian ideal insofar as Hill

1 6 0 Q U I N N

Y

resists ‘‘spontaneity,’’ which is codified in the ideology of individu-alism and which encourages the rejection of tradition; however,the valorization of moments of ecstatic revelation is similar. Or, ashe says elsewhere in Canaan, ‘‘self expression’’ is ‘‘the first to go,’’leaving something more enduring, which he calls ‘‘selfhood,’’which is a kind of regulation of the ‘‘pace of being’’ to ‘‘the earth inher slow / approaches to withdrawal.’’

Two poems later, we come across a restatement of this theme, asa Britannia figure comes forth:

visions of truth or dreamsas they rise –

to terms of gracewhere grace has surprised us – the unsustaining

wondrously sustained

Grace that does not surprise is not likely to be authentic, sincegrace must come from a source beyond our human agency. Our‘‘visions of truth’’ cannot sustain our polities, or so it would seem in‘‘To the High Court of Parliament,’’ and yet grace steps in assponsor, and we see the elision of the realm of politics and therealm of the spirit, which leads us into the later sequence of fivepoems all titled ‘‘Mysticism and Democracy.’’ The terms of thisgrace are mediated through the collective (the ‘‘us’’ of the fourthline), not the individual, and point us to what he later calls ‘‘thecommon numen,’’ which recalls the earlier discussion of ‘‘com-monness,’’ and the word ‘‘common’’ takes on cumulative force inCanaan, indicating how deeply Hill is concerned with matters ofcommunity in the book.

His problem when he confronts the present state of the Englishcommonal is that he sees only examples of moral turpitude andamnesia. In a recent interview, he remarks, ‘‘I return constantly towhat I think is one of the major outrages of modern life: theneglect of the dead, a refusal to acknowledge what we owe them,and a refusal to submit ourselves to the wisdom of the dead.’’ Theburden of the book, then, is to imagine in the face of this panoramastandards of moral excellence and mystical vision, all the timeaware how these can be debased by social contexture (‘‘in the vaticexchanges // between committees’’). Whereas for Hill the Emer-


R

sonian, filled with the knowledge of this danger, retreats from thepolitical, Hill persists in his explorations of it, convinced that onemust find the junctures by which idealism can animate ‘‘the con-duct of meetings and business’’ – hence the ‘‘mysticism’’ men-tioned everywhere in the book. Now it may be objected that suchtalk is outmoded in discourse on the nation; this would be fair ifthere were any intimation that the New Left is capable of provid-ing a rhetoric that could command su≈cient allegiance to socialideals that would encourage people, when necessary, to sacrifictheir lives in defense of them. For that is what preceding genera-tions did and what is slowly being forgotten, along with the factthat present freedoms were won by previous sacrifice. There is amoving expression of this amnesia in Sebastian Faulks’s novelBirdsong, in which a female character in the 1970s researches hergrandfather’s involvement in World War I:

She moved through the space beneath the arch where theman was sweeping. She found the other pillars identicallymarked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names thatwere carved on them.

‘‘Who are these, these . . . ?’’ She gestured with her hand.‘‘These?’’ The man with the brush sounded surprised.

‘‘The lost.’’‘‘Men who died in this battle?’’‘‘No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in

the cemeteries.’’‘‘These are just the . . . unfound?’’She looked at the vault above her head and then around in

panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the skyhad been papered in footnotes.

When she could speak again, she said, ‘‘From the wholewar?’’

The man shook his head. ‘‘Just these fields.’’ He gesturedwith his arm.

Elizabeth went through and sat on the steps on the otherside of the monument. Beneath her was a formal gardenwith some rows of white headstones, each with a tendedplant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in theweak winter sunlight.

1 6 2 Q U I N N

Y

‘‘Nobody told me.’’ She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. ‘‘My God,nobody told me.’’

Some of the detailing here (especially Elizabeth’s last gesture) isclumsy, but it does not detract from the force of the moment forboth reader and character. Embedded as it is in a plot that spansfour generations, the scene prompts the realization of how familyhistory intersects with national history and, moreover, of the par-ticular debt owed by proceeding generations to those who havesacrificed their lives. The Emersonian response to such a debt isdismissal – one cannot enslave oneself to the past – but that doesnot take cognizance of the way this debt can inspire and animate awhole society.

In the title poem of Canaan and ‘‘To the Nieuport Scout,’’ Hill isconcerned with English experience in World War I. The fighterplanes engage, and the moment of sacrifice is

a tilt a flareas though of mirrors –

dared by their luckthey outdare it

and spinfrom the fumy towerstaking England with them – flame-tattered

pirouettesquenched in a cloud.

Because their sacrifice was forgotten, England was lost as well,becoming the ‘‘eidolon’’ of the first poem in the book, ‘‘unsubstan-tial yet voiding / substance like quicklime,’’ the quicklime thrownon the bodies of the dead during warfare so that their putrefactiondoes not spread disease, but here symbolizing their erasure fromcollective memory. Hill attempts to counter this loss with paren-talia, which were periodical observances among the ancient Ro-mans in honor of dead parents or relations, and a poem of this titleimmediately follows ‘‘To the Nieuport Scout.’’

But it is of note that Hill goes further afield for moral exem-plars, ‘‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis’’ (Of the Laws of War and of Peace)


R

looking to Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who was part of the Kreisauconspiracy against Hitler and was executed in 1944. Earlier in thecollection there is a poem entitled ‘‘Sobieski’s Shield,’’ and thereare poems in memory of Stefan George and Aleksandr Blok.Through such figures he explores ideas of the worth of art invarious adverse circumstances (George with the Nazis, Blok withthe communists), and von Haeften and Sobieski stand as guard-ians of a Europe that remains for the most part unrealized – thatis, a Europe where Justice and Equity hold sway. In the case of vonHaeften, Hill values the clear-eyed deliberating vision of the manwho opposes evil, and shows great care for the subsequent fate ofEurope. Von Haeften, having acted with such reason, is vouch-safed a moment almost sublime, which in turn becomes visionaryin Hill’s depiction:

There is no bettervision I can summon: you were upheldon the strong wings of the Psalms before you died.

This contrasts favorably with ‘‘the shrieking / of witness, zealots /high on propane’’ and those ‘‘enthusiasts of sublime emptiness /mountaineering into old age’’ mentioned later in the book. Hilldoes something quite rare here: he discriminates between visionsand says that some are of worth, others not. The Emersoniandispensation allows that any individual’s vision, if experiencedstrongly and inspiring conviction, is of value. Hill, though drawnto those moments that recapture the ‘‘innocence of the first in-scription,’’ insists that without the proper context they can be atbest fatuous and at worst evil. This is the axis that Ricks describes.On one hand, he recognizes the need and importance of visionaryexperience as something that escapes historical duration for a briefwhile, providing knowledge of matters of the spirit, but at thesame instance seeks out its meaning in that very element it de-parts from.

This tension, rather than leaving Canaan hamstrung, animatesit – nowhere more incandescently than in its landscape descrip-tions. To Emerson and the Romantics the landscape drew feelingsof exaltation and expanse from the human soul. Hill refuses themountaintop in favor of more closely observed flora. In ‘‘To JohnConstable: In Absentia,’’ he says:

1 6 4 Q U I N N

Y

Anxious griefs, grievous anxieties, are not to besublimed through chiaroscuro. Knowing this,

you framed it clearly.

Hill would seem to add an extra meaning to the verb ‘‘to sublime’’here, that of an action that is in opposition to seeing clearly, that isalmost lying. With mention of the biblical figures Siloam andBartimeus elsewhere in the book, Hill stresses the connection ofclear vision with Christianity, which is to say that such claritycomes not with the jettisoning of tradition but only with fullcognizance of it. There are many passages of such attentive natu-ral description, the most sustained being ‘‘Cycle.’’ But perhaps themost touching (though Hill would probably dislike the epithet) is‘‘Sorrel,’’ which I give in full below. Its epigraph, we are told in anote, is from The Botany of Worcestershire: ‘‘Very common andwidely distributed. . . . It is called Sorrow . . . in some parts ofWorcestershire.’’

Memory worsening – let it go as rainstreams on half-visible clatter of the wind

lapsing and rising,that clouds the pond’s green mistletoe of spawn,seeps among nettlebeds and rust-brown sorrel,perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light,makes carved shapes crumble: the ill-weathering stonesalvation’s troth-plight, plumed, of the elect.

In a book that dwells so much on the value of inheritance andcollective memory, the opening statement here, which one pre-sumes is autobiographical, records the moment when the speakeris unable to call on his inheritance. But because he has schooledhimself so deeply in this inheritance, it endures as discipline eveninto the amnesic present of the poem, since he perceives in theimmediate landscape figures for his own loss of memory. Thepond, which will be transformed into Siloam in a later poem forthe nonjurant William Law, is clouded and visibility is halved.Elsewhere in Canaan, Hill is filled with savage anger; here it isonly sorrow and resignation (‘‘let it go’’). Which is not to say thatthis last emotion is somehow more praiseworthy than anger, butrather it stands out strongly in contrast. The last line has a referen-


R

tial density absent in the rest of the poem and invites commentary.‘‘Troth-plight’’ is a solemn promise, or the act of making this,usually used in reference to marriage. Here it is the promise ofsalvation given to the elect in the form of stone carvings, perhapsinscriptions. But even these do not endure, and one wonderswhether Hill is saying that with their disintegration, the elect losetheir heaven. This ambiguity is present also in the adjective‘‘plumed’’: the second meaning The Oxford English Dictionary

gives is feathered, suggesting an ethereal plumage in which oneenters heaven; the first meaning, however, is plucked, or strippedof feathers.

In this light, Emerson becomes the figure who is too intoxicatedby ‘‘rawness’’ to counter it with reason and thus drifts into asecular Antinomianism that becomes the justification for a societythat does not value its ‘‘entailed riches.’’ In the present day, and inHill’s terms, that society is English as much as American – bothare ‘‘dark-lands.’’ This interpretation is paralleled by Hill’s ambiv-alent relation to both English and American poetic traditions. Iwould argue that Emersonian Romanticism remains the centralelement of contemporary American poetry. Does this then placeHill firmly within the English tradition? Surprisingly not. Onleaving Emerson and turning back to England, we find that Hill,with his preoccupation with ‘‘rawness,’’ or visionary knowledge, ismarginal to English poetry also. In a review, Hill provides whatcan only be called a refutation of the poetry of Philip Larkin,whom many would agree to be the most representative post–World War II English poet: ‘‘what Larkin represents is an assump-tion, a narrow English possessiveness, with regard to ‘good sense’and ‘generous common humanity.’ ‘Good sense,’ so propertied, sokeen to admit others, at a price, to its properties, strikes me as adeplorable kind of bienséance.’’ A more recent and more streetwiseflourishing of this bienséance can be witnessed in the work ofyounger British poets of the mainstream, among them Carol AnnDu√y, Ian Duhig, and Sean O’Brien; and to a great extent thisexplains the general neglect of Hill’s work, especially of Canaan.(Canaan was not shortlisted for any of the major prizes in theUnited Kingdom, let alone awarded any; and Hill, at a reading inManchester in July 2000, remarked that copies of the book were

1 6 6 Q U I N N

Y

being remaindered. None of its poems were included in the selec-tion of Hill’s work that appeared in several major anthologiespublished between 1998 and 1999.) In this mainstream, politicalcritique is acceptable only if it is leftist or feminist in orientationand deploys irony against what might loosely be described asEnglish establishment values. What is unacceptable (and incom-prehensible to the exponents of this mainstream) is a radical cri-tique that does not reject but depends on English tradition. Hill ispreoccupied with ideas of ‘‘generous common humanity,’’ but hewill not deploy an ersatz version of it in his poetry to ingratiatehimself with the reader. He o√ers a very di√erent model of thepoetic self:

However much and however rightly we protest against thevanity of supposing it to be merely the ‘‘spontaneous over-flow of powerful feelings,’’ poetic utterance is nonetheless anutterance of the self, the self demanding to be loved, de-manding love in the form of recognition and ‘‘absolution.’’The poet is perhaps the first to be dismayed by such a discov-ery and to seek the conversion of his ‘‘daemon’’ to a belief inaltruistic responsibility. But this dismay is as nothing com-pared to the shocking encounter with ‘‘empirical guilt’’ not asa manageable hypothesis, but as irredeemable error in thevery substance and texture of his craft and pride. It is herethat he knows the a∆iction of ‘‘being fallen in the ‘they’ ’’and yet it is here that his selfhood may be made at-one withitself. He may learn to live in his a∆iction, not with thecynical indi√erence of the reprobate but with the renewedsense of a vocation: that of necessarily bearing his peculiarunnecessary shame in a world growing ever more shameless.

geoffrey hill in america

Documents