Geoffrey Hill's later work

Radiance of apprehension

Alex Wylie

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526124968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

An exploration of the later work of Geoffrey Hill, often described as 'the greatest living poet' in his lifetime. This book reads, interprets, evaluates, and sets in context the work of Hill's prolific later period from 1996 to 2016, the year of his death.

Chapter 1

‘A theory of energy’

If Geoffrey Hill’s poetry has ever been at odds with prevailing literary tastes, fashions, and commitments, then his later work, both in poetry and criticism, is increasingly open about this being at odds. This later work is often a self-referential examination of just what it is that makes it so at odds with its surrounding literary and political culture, embracing that sense of “cultural recalcitrance”¹ – though certainly not entirely without caveat or regret. This strong sense of eccentricity, a favourite word of the later Hill’s, arises both from his developments of New Critical and modernist beliefs, an investment bound to put him at bay among the postmodernist culture of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, and from his acute sense of poetry being by nature political and historical, a sense which, as he saw it, made him a natural antagonist of the culture in which this late poetry takes, or does not take, its place. However, as widely acclaimed poet and critic, one of the most written-about of the last few decades in the English language, as well as fulfilling the role of Oxford Professor of Poetry in this period – not to mention being knighted in 2012 – Hill’s self-presentation as an isolated and derided figure demands some explanation – which is one element of this book’s general approach. Geoffrey Hill was routinely described as ‘the greatest living poet in English’² and variants thereof, and so he had a formidable reputation as a poet – though it was, rather, his reputation as a formidable poet which made him, as he saw it, a decidedly minority figure in broadly cultural terms.

I categorise Geoffrey Hill’s later work as roughly a twenty-year period, from around 1996 (the year of ‘Dividing Legacies’, an essay on T.S. Eliot which I see as inaugurating this later phase) to 2016, the year of his death at the age of eighty-four, in which Hill published his last piece, ‘Mightier and Darker’, an essay-review on Charles Williams in the Times Literary Supplement.³ This body of work incorporates poetry, literary-critical essays, and Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures, and I draw here on unpublished material housed in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds which is dated to this period. Hill’s later work is a distinct phase, though there are continuations and reminiscences of his earlier work within it; the period is distinguished not least by the stunning prolificity which it exhibits, Hill producing thirteen new books of poetry between roughly 1996 (Canaan, which is not figured here, was published in this year) and 2012; two books of critical essays; and fifteen Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures between 2010 and 2015. Hill had previously published six books of poetry and two books of criticism between 1959 and 1996.

The criticism of this later period may appear daunting to new readers of his work. It is deeply invested in philosophical perspectives, to the extent that one might categorise much of Hill’s later work in criticism as ‘philosophy of literature’: personally, however, I feel that such a categorisation would detract from the available dimensions of literary criticism. Hill’s criticism is philosophical, and his later poetry and criticism are a working through – not necessarily a working out of – various intellectual, moral, and psychological concerns. On that point, I would claim that the interdependence of the intellectual, the moral, and the psychological – that is, the emotional, the deeply personal – is necessary to writing of real importance: in a work of art, the ‘problem’ which the piece embodies is both a ‘problem’ in an existential sense and as intellectual and moral puzzlement. This sense of the problematic certainly drives Hill’s later output, copious and challenging as it is: and a remark about poetry of the Movement of the 1950s, including such poets as Philip Larkin (a favourite bête noire) and Kingsley Amis, against which his early work (particularly his first collection, For the Unfallen, of 1959) took its directions, sums up this crucial aspect of his later work: “when you have techne without crisis, the result is poetry similar to that written by the Movement poets of the 1950s”.⁴ Reading through the two new books of criticism in the Collected Critical Writings, and the thirteen books of poetry (to date) in this later period, one is constantly reminded that ‘crisis’ harks back to the Greek word krinein, to decide or judge: it is a word that holds in a single thought perplexity and resolution.⁵

Throughout the criticism of this later period, certain fundamental problems are being worried away at: one of the most fundamental of these being, precisely, being. Hill’s obsession with being begins in his criticism as early as 1975, in the essay ‘Perplexed Persistence: The Exemplary Failure of T.H. Green’, being figured here as “that which points beyond the data”:

The difference between Kant and the Victorian students of Kant in England may well turn on a difference of emphasis concerning that which “points beyond the data”. In Kant this is a “common element” existing as “a logical presupposition, a purely formal implication”; in Sidgwick and Green that which points beyond the data is more often a pious wish. Pious wishes are of course wholly valid, unless they are presented as logical presuppositions and purely formal implications. It is then that they cease to be “that which points beyond the data” and become the “ultimate vague reasons” which Whitehead has so precisely described. (Collected Critical Writings [henceforth CCW] 113)

I wish to begin my exploration of Hill’s later work by remarking on his perplexed fascination with being; and to begin with that sentence, which might stand over much of the energy and drive of the later poetry: “Pious wishes are of course wholly valid, unless they are presented as logical presuppositions and purely formal implications.” Along with Hill’s perplexed concern with being, or “that which points beyond the data”, goes an ethical self-recognition that one’s own desires, or “pious wishes”, cannot fail to orientate one’s most “purely formal” interests. In other words, you cannot wish being into being, as it were, but to try to do so is more than understandable, provided you recognise that you are indeed doing this – and this sort of self-recognition is the crucial task of the writer, in Hill’s view. In the words of F.H. Bradley, a philosopher central to Hill’s later approach, the task is “to get within the judgement the condition of the judgement” (CCW 566). And in another relatively early essay, ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’ (1983), Hill writes (quoting T.H. Green again) “to place ourselves ‘outside the process by which our knowledge is developed’ is to conceive of an untenable ‘ecstasy’, whereas to recognize our being within the process is to accept our true condition” (CCW 158). This apprehension, taken largely from F.H. Bradley also, is a crucial dynamo of Hill’s later work, as it is one of its central themes. To what extent Hill is successful in this ethical task is debatable; indeed, the extent to which this scrutiny of self-recognition is ultimately a counsel of perfection is also up for debate, and, indeed, has been and is being debated.

Peter Robinson has recently expressed scepticism on this point. “Bradley”, writes Robinson, “allows that ‘the more the conditions of your assertion are included in your assertion, so much the truer and less erroneous does your judgement become’. But, he adds, ‘can the conditions of judgement ever be made complete and comprised within the judgement? In my opinion this is impossible.’ What Hill takes as a prerequisite for probity is – given the singular complexity and extent of the world when contrasted with (for instance) the limits of an individual’s senses – exactly what Bradley believes to be impossible”.⁶ This is an important counter-argument, which actually draws attention to another essential element of Hill’s later approach. Along with the obsessed concern for being in Hill’s later work goes an enthusiastic commitment to what he calls ‘eros’ (CCW 571 et al.) – that is, an existentialist sense of becoming alongside the desire for being. It is this sense of eros, of becoming, which Hill takes from F.H. Bradley, that drives Hill’s sense of “a theory of energy” which his later work explores embodies. (The erotic sense being that the exploration is the embodiment.)

As early as the 1970s, then, Hill displays an interest in nineteenth-century British Idealism (philosophers like F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green), its exemplary failures and pious wishes. In part, this interest is part of an ongoing engagement with nineteenth-century British literary and intellectual culture, but it also represents an interest in being and its failure, whether exemplary or not, in an era of philosophical and economic materialism. If “Metaphysics remain | in common language something of a joke” (CCW 490) then perhaps it is their embattled, derided nature which is of a kind with Hill’s sense of being at bay; or perhaps an engagement with metaphysics in the present era demands an uncommon language. In short, the British Idealists such as Sigdwick and Green, here, and most emphatically F.H. Bradley, are important to Hill’s later work, as is the tension between the “purely formal” and the “pious wish”: or, put in starker terms, the objective and the subjective. Indeed, one of the major figures in Hill’s later criticism, with whom Hill has a fraught and evolving relationship, is John Ruskin, a figure also piously wishing and asserting the purely formal, according to Hill’s overall analysis – it is Ruskin’s term “intrinsic value” which is a point of crux for Hill’s later writings about poetry and being. ‘Intrinsic value’ is a term which evokes being, the essence, the thing-in-itself, just as it evokes the a-historical New Critical poem by which Hill is tempted.⁷ “‘Intrinsic value’, as Ruskin uses it, is emphatic but not precise; though its power of emphasis is due in great part to its capacity to suggest precision” (CCW 388). This theme runs throughout Hill’s later criticism, and is, in no small part, a worried vigilance over his own suggestions of precision: in the words of F.H. Bradley – that philosopher so crucial to Hill’s later approach – “illusions begotten on the brain by the wish of the heart”.⁸

Hill’s critique of T.S. Eliot

A major point of departure for Hill’s later work is his critique of T.S. Eliot. Bradley is readily associated with Eliot – who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher, and who published the essay ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’ in the Times Literary Supplement in 1927 – but Hill’s later period is driven by his reading of Bradley. Indeed, Hill’s critique of Eliot is driven in no small part by his interpretation of Bradley contra Eliot. However, Eliot’s theory of impersonality, and his example as poet-critic, is a pervasive element in Hill’s overall development as poet and critic. Hill’s divergence from Eliot is begun to be spelled out explicitly in 1996, in what I take to be the beginning of Hill’s later period, in the essay ‘Dividing Legacies’, a direction traced further yet in the later essays ‘Eros in F.H. Bradley and T.S. Eliot’ and ‘Word Value in F.H. Bradley and T.S. Eliot’, two essays included in Alienated Majesty in the Collected Critical Writings (2008), which were originally delivered as lectures at Cambridge University in January 2005.

Hill’s critique of Eliot centres on Eliot’s increasingly pragmatic view of poetry, which Hill sees as a dereliction (“Yeats died and Eliot abdicated”, as he remarks [CCW 579]), but it is also about the different use to which the two poet-critics put their readings of F.H. Bradley. This critique should not be thought of as an all-out rejection of Eliot and his poetics: rather, it is an exploration and development of Eliot’s ideas beyond Eliot, as the New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century was, including the work of such American poets and poet-critics as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Richard Eberhart, for instance, figures hugely influential on Hill’s early work. It is a correction rather than an outright repudiation, though Hill often comes out quite strongly against Eliot in the essays of Alienated Majesty. Hill’s later work, too, is broadly New Critical in its allegiances, both proclaimed and tacit; though these allegiances can be quite overtly stated, as in one Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture, for instance, in which Hill quotes with heartfelt approval (“My God, if only I could have written that!”) R.P. Blackmur’s definition of poetry, that it ...