Geoffrey Hill: poetry should be shocking and surprising
Sometimes difficult and often very funny, Sir Geoffrey Hill is Britain’s greatest living poet. He grants a rare audience to Sameer Rahim
Searching and searing: Geoffrey Hill Photo: Clara Molden
Geoffrey
Hill is arguably our greatest post-war poet. Over the past 50 years
he has produced searching, searing work on England's troubled history, the
Holocaust, the meaning of Christianity and the decline of modern culture.
When I interviewed Seamus
Heaney in 2009, he was full of praise for Hill: “He has a
strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech,” Heaney told
me, “a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of
everything in Britain”. The novelist Colm
Tóibín is another admirer. “Every phrase he uses has a
sense that it was examined and sifted not only in the light of mere
experience,” he tells me via email, “but in the full light of knowledge, and
with the full realisation of how dark, ambiguous and misleading knowledge
can be.” He is a poet, adds Tóibín, who “seeks to lift language beyond
itself”.
Despite eminent supporters, though, Hill has never received the popular
acclaim or prizes lavished on Philip Larkin, Ted
Hughes and Heaney. His work is dismissed for being old fashioned and
obscure. He is rarely taught in schools. In one notorious attack, Tom Paulin
accused him of being a closet fan of Enoch Powell. In The Triumph of Love
(1998), Hill summed up what many in the poetry establishment think of him:
“Rancorous, narcissistic old sod – what / makes him go on?”
Between 1959 and 1983 he published five books of poetry. During the next 13
years of near silence he suffered from depression and had a triple bypass.
Since Canaan (1996) he has been resurgent, producing a collection almost
every year. Currently Oxford professor of poetry, he is now also Sir
Geoffrey Hill – last year’s knighthood accepted to honour his parents. Now
arrives the summation of his life’s work: Broken
Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012.
After teaching at Boston University for 18 years, Hill is settled back in
England, near Cambridge. I meet him at the rectory he shares with his
American wife Alice Goodman, a librettist and Church of England priest.
Resembling a cross between Michelangelo’s Jeremiah and Father Christmas,
Hill greets me with diligent courtesy. On the rectory walls are photographs
of his parents William and Hilda and his aunt Eva: the three dedicatees of
Broken Hierarchies. I spy a print of Hogarth’s The Distrest Poet – a wedding
present, he tells me.
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Hill was born in Bromsgrove in 1932, the son of a police constable. “My father
rarely read,” says Hill in his rich, grave voice. “My mother was a very keen
reader but she read circulating library novels.” As a boy he loved the comic
Radio Fun and in The Triumph of Love recalls: “In Scripture class, / under
the desk lid, perilous comic strips / of dentures blown from trumpets.”
(Later he sold his comics to buy The Wind in the Willows.) At Sunday school
he won Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and “fell in love”, instantly hoping “to
do something that might equal or exceed the mysterious beauty of these
things”. One Christmas, his parents bought him the essays of TS
Eliot.
Aside from reading, what truly kindled his imagination was seeing German
bombers over Bromsgrove. “It was a strange metaphysical super reality,” he
tells me. “Here were these peculiar, businesslike – sinisterly businesslike
– winged things.” He pauses. “I can still remember the peculiar frisson of
it. Strange as it sounds that incident – which can’t have lasted more than a
minute and a half – has dictated for the rest of my life the way I have
perceived certain juxtapositions of the real and the surreal. One is
simultaneously terrified, appalled and curiously detached. Which is as good
a description of a poem as I can think of.”
He also saw Coventry bombed from a distance. “It was night and on the eastern horizon there was a reddish-bronzy pulsing light,” he says. Fifty years later he would write about the experience: “huge silent whumps / of flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal / cloud-base of her now legendary dust”. When he saw footage of the death camps and later learned about the atom bomb, he entered “a new and terrible dimension of existence,” he says. “I’m never interested in watching films of books by Lewis or Tolkien or – who’s that Harry Potter woman? – because when they attempt to juxtapose the normal with the supernormal – the school room suddenly becoming a focus for evil or whatever – I don’t need it. I’ve had my fix.”
Hill’s poems are haunted by atrocity. “September Song” from King Log (1968) elegises a child murdered by the Nazis. Her dates are below the title: born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42. “That was uncanny,” Hill tells me. “I went to an exhibition of children’s art from Terezín … 19.6.32 is one day after my birthday.” In asking why he lives and she does not the poem is as much about the poet as the girl: a tension acknowledged in the bracketed stanza: “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)”.
This scrupulousness about what can be written about the Holocaust – his efforts to create what Tóibín calls “a responsible music” – is obliquely addressed in “History as Poetry” from the same collection. “Poetry / Unearths from among the speechless dead / Lazarus mystified, common man / Of death.” Is Lazarus “mystified”, puzzled or obscured, by being brought back to life? What does the unearthing feel like from his point of view? (Incidentally, this scenario is dramatised in Tóibín’s last novel The Testament of Mary.)
Hill allows this interpretation. He believes poems should stand independent of their creator. He quotes the choreographer Mark Morris, a family friend who has worked with Goodman. Morris declared in a recent interview: “I’m not interested in self-expression but in expressiveness.” Hill says he “put perfectly what I’ve been trying to say gropingly and inadequately for years. The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.”
At Oxford in the Fifties, Hill’s greatest poetic influences were American: John Berryman and Allen Tate, whose poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was especially important to him. After Oxford he taught at Leeds and published his first collection, For the Unfallen, in 1959. Most of those poems were composed while hiking through Worcestershire: the first line of the opening poem “Genesis” reads: “Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God.” He valued the work of his friend Tony Harrison (“I would have loved to have written a book called The School of Eloquence”) but the Movement poets left him cold – especially Larkin.
Though he paid to subscribe to Larkin’s first collection The Less Deceived, when he opened it he felt “no flicker of sympathy whatsoever”. Did he like nothing at all? “There are two poems by Larkin that I like very much – they’re both very early. One is called ‘Wedding-Wind’ and the other is called ‘Next, Please’. The final line is: ‘In her wake / No waters breed or break’. I think I thought it was good because it’s Hill-ish.
“But for the rest? No. I thought they were dull and finger-wagging. And I disliked their prim moralising.”
In 1964, the critic Christopher Ricks brought Hill’s work to a wider audience through an article in the London Magazine. Ricks writes via email: “I bought his first book, For the Unfallen, and have never found it other than moving and mountain-moving”. Hill says he was “very grateful” for the attention in what was then a prestigious publication. Over the years Ricks has been his finest critic – though they have disagreed, notably over Larkin.
“They are never of one mind, those two,” says Goodman, joining our conversation. “When I was young,” she says, “going from a Ricks to a Hill lecture was like going from 78rpm to 33rpm.”
“She means that Christopher was quick and scintillating and I was laborious and convoluted,” says Hill.
I am reminded of a Blake quotation Ricks used in a recent essay on Hill: “Opposition is true Friendship.” “Exactly,” Hill says.
Another contentious area for Hill is religion. Much of his verse dramatises a passionate wrestling with faith. Is he a Christian poet? “Well, it’s a tag, isn’t it?” says Hill. “They tag you with a convenient epithet.” He pauses. “I’m reasonably au fait with the Christian documentation. I’m quite able to use theological terms.” He turns to the Rev Alice Goodman: “Can I say that I dislike the Church of England in so many ways without harming you?” he asks. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written appreciatively on the following lines from Canaan: “I say it is not faithless / to stand without faith, keeping open / vigil at the site.” One reason why Williams and other members of the clergy love Hill, Goodman claims, is “because he expresses the things about the Church and about the faith that they felt but could not in their position articulate”. Yet she reminds him he has written sensitively on Vaughan’s and Donne’s work. “Yes,” he replies, “because it’s excellent and fascinating. Not because I suddenly feel that Vaughan is a brother in the faith or that reading Donne converted me to a love of Christ.”
Goodman points out that he kneels at the Church altar on Sundays. Her husband, she says, is “communicant but resentful”.
“When did I say that?” says Hill.
“You didn’t, I just said it now.”
“It sounds like me.”
“I’ve been married to you for some years,” she says drily.
Geoffrey Hill: Like a cross between Michelangelo's Jeremiah and Father Christmas Photo: Clara Molden
Hill’s perceived political views are more likely to get him into hot water than any religious doubts. In Mercian Hymns he included the line, “To watch the Tiber foaming out much blood,” adapted from Virgil, but made infamous by Enoch Powell in his 1968 anti-immigration speech. Reviewing Hill in 1985, Paulin wrote: “It would be tempting to detect a Powelite strain in Hill’s conservatism.” The association pains Hill: “I feel angry and helpless and hopeless at being so misunderstood.” Since he feels no affinity with Powell why did he allude to him? “It’s a public utterance which by being made public is available for expressive use … I used it as an available piece of rhetoric in the structuring of a rhetorical pattern.” Alluding to the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell’s words about his torturer, Hill concludes: “Anyone who can make such an elementary gaffe when reading a poem and still insist on it seems to me not susceptible to reason.”
What are his politics? “I’ve described myself in public as a Ruskinian Tory, but adding: it is only Ruskinian Tories who sound like Marxists these days.” His work shows a deep sympathy for the suffering working classes of the 19th century. He commemorates the labours of his family in Mercian Hymns and 2005’s Scenes from Comus: “Severn-side blacksmiths and nailers who must have bled.” What about modern politics? “We’re free to vote for the oligarchs,” he says, “we’re free to vote for our jailers.” He believes much contemporary poetry is complicit with power. “The language they think of as democratic anti-elitist are really the scraps of the English language that have dropped from the feasting tables of the oligarchs. This sort of ordinary-language poetry isn’t democratic at all: it’s servile. Yes, servile.”
An Oxford lecture last year took to task the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy for suggesting that text messaging could be a useful medium for poetry. He also took a swipe at creative writing courses, saying that one of her poems “could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage”. Pretending to teach someone to write is a form of charlatanism, he believes. “If you’re giving people confidence in writing about what they know then whatever it is you’re doing it has nothing to do with poetry ... You’re providing a kind of therapy.”
Hill’s poetry is far from being ordinary-language. But he robustly defends his right to be obscure. “To say that a poet is to be condemned because she refers to the Diet of Worms and we don’t know what the Diet of Worms is – is it something on MasterChef? – or is inaccessible because she invokes some field of vision which we have difficulty in grasping: this seems to me a kind of crass bullying.” Kenneth Haynes, the editor of Broken Hierarchies, tells me via email that although you can look up the references, “the annotation isn’t the hard part with Hill’s poems … the difficulty only begins after looking things up”.
In any case, says Hill, you can always use Google. He, however, stays away from the online world. “I would just hate to be in thrall to the internet.” Goodman, by contrast, enthusiastically uses social media. During our conversation she snaps us with her phone and posts our photos on Facebook. Hill admits his wife “sometimes tells me what has been on Facebook, if she thinks it will interest me”.
Hill’s renaissance since 1996 has been attributed to antidepressants. I ask him about another source: George Eliot. In his essay “Redeeming the Time”, he picks holes in her 1868 political pamphlet written in the voice of the radical Felix Holt. What it excludes, wrote Hill, is the “antiphonal voice of the heckler” – a voice to question the author’s assumptions. “It was probably true that in thinking about George Eliot I discovered myself using a phrase like the ‘voice of the heckler’”, he admits. Indeed in later collections he has great fun heckling himself: he mocks his “Up the Hill Difficulty” (a nod to Bunyan); refers to himself as an “obnoxious chthonic old fart” (Paulin called him a “chthonic nationalist”); and says he can “out-rap” rappers, only he’s a “Bit short of puff these days”.
His attacks on the “Entertainment overkill” of modern culture speaks to what Heaney described as his “acute distress at the falling away of standards”. This often takes the form of a pungent grumpiness. In the poem “Broken Hierarchies”, from Without Title (2006), an English landscape is lashed by a storm: “the roadway sprouts ten thousand flowerets, / storm-paddies instantly reaped, replenished, / and again cut down”. Those flattened roadside flowers make an emblem of tawdry Britain. “I contrast hierarchy with hegemony,” Hill tells me. (“Bless hierarchy, dismiss hegemony, / Thus I grind to conclusion” he writes in his most recent sequence, The Daybooks.)
This elitist strain appeals to some and appals others. In some moods it’s just what I need. But I prefer what he earlier described as his “juxtapositions of the real and the surreal”: a world in which King Offa of Mercia is “overlord of the M5” and the Royalist musician William Lawes auditions at Ronnie Scott’s. “I try to make a distinction between enjoyment and joy,” says Hill. “You’re only prepared to enjoy what you already have a taste for: whereas joy is shocking and surprising”. What is most joyfully surprising in Hill’s poems (to me) is when he takes the moral landscape in broadest view. As he writes in The Triumph of Love, there is “igneous, sedimentary, / conglomerate”, but “particular grace, / individual love, decency, endurance, / are traceable across the faults”.
September Song
born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
Geoffrey Hill
September Song by Geoffrey Hill © 1994 taken from Selected Poems (Viking) at £9.99
Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 is published by OUP at £31.50
He also saw Coventry bombed from a distance. “It was night and on the eastern horizon there was a reddish-bronzy pulsing light,” he says. Fifty years later he would write about the experience: “huge silent whumps / of flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal / cloud-base of her now legendary dust”. When he saw footage of the death camps and later learned about the atom bomb, he entered “a new and terrible dimension of existence,” he says. “I’m never interested in watching films of books by Lewis or Tolkien or – who’s that Harry Potter woman? – because when they attempt to juxtapose the normal with the supernormal – the school room suddenly becoming a focus for evil or whatever – I don’t need it. I’ve had my fix.”
Hill’s poems are haunted by atrocity. “September Song” from King Log (1968) elegises a child murdered by the Nazis. Her dates are below the title: born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42. “That was uncanny,” Hill tells me. “I went to an exhibition of children’s art from Terezín … 19.6.32 is one day after my birthday.” In asking why he lives and she does not the poem is as much about the poet as the girl: a tension acknowledged in the bracketed stanza: “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)”.
This scrupulousness about what can be written about the Holocaust – his efforts to create what Tóibín calls “a responsible music” – is obliquely addressed in “History as Poetry” from the same collection. “Poetry / Unearths from among the speechless dead / Lazarus mystified, common man / Of death.” Is Lazarus “mystified”, puzzled or obscured, by being brought back to life? What does the unearthing feel like from his point of view? (Incidentally, this scenario is dramatised in Tóibín’s last novel The Testament of Mary.)
Hill allows this interpretation. He believes poems should stand independent of their creator. He quotes the choreographer Mark Morris, a family friend who has worked with Goodman. Morris declared in a recent interview: “I’m not interested in self-expression but in expressiveness.” Hill says he “put perfectly what I’ve been trying to say gropingly and inadequately for years. The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.”
At Oxford in the Fifties, Hill’s greatest poetic influences were American: John Berryman and Allen Tate, whose poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was especially important to him. After Oxford he taught at Leeds and published his first collection, For the Unfallen, in 1959. Most of those poems were composed while hiking through Worcestershire: the first line of the opening poem “Genesis” reads: “Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God.” He valued the work of his friend Tony Harrison (“I would have loved to have written a book called The School of Eloquence”) but the Movement poets left him cold – especially Larkin.
Though he paid to subscribe to Larkin’s first collection The Less Deceived, when he opened it he felt “no flicker of sympathy whatsoever”. Did he like nothing at all? “There are two poems by Larkin that I like very much – they’re both very early. One is called ‘Wedding-Wind’ and the other is called ‘Next, Please’. The final line is: ‘In her wake / No waters breed or break’. I think I thought it was good because it’s Hill-ish.
“But for the rest? No. I thought they were dull and finger-wagging. And I disliked their prim moralising.”
In 1964, the critic Christopher Ricks brought Hill’s work to a wider audience through an article in the London Magazine. Ricks writes via email: “I bought his first book, For the Unfallen, and have never found it other than moving and mountain-moving”. Hill says he was “very grateful” for the attention in what was then a prestigious publication. Over the years Ricks has been his finest critic – though they have disagreed, notably over Larkin.
“They are never of one mind, those two,” says Goodman, joining our conversation. “When I was young,” she says, “going from a Ricks to a Hill lecture was like going from 78rpm to 33rpm.”
“She means that Christopher was quick and scintillating and I was laborious and convoluted,” says Hill.
I am reminded of a Blake quotation Ricks used in a recent essay on Hill: “Opposition is true Friendship.” “Exactly,” Hill says.
Another contentious area for Hill is religion. Much of his verse dramatises a passionate wrestling with faith. Is he a Christian poet? “Well, it’s a tag, isn’t it?” says Hill. “They tag you with a convenient epithet.” He pauses. “I’m reasonably au fait with the Christian documentation. I’m quite able to use theological terms.” He turns to the Rev Alice Goodman: “Can I say that I dislike the Church of England in so many ways without harming you?” he asks. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written appreciatively on the following lines from Canaan: “I say it is not faithless / to stand without faith, keeping open / vigil at the site.” One reason why Williams and other members of the clergy love Hill, Goodman claims, is “because he expresses the things about the Church and about the faith that they felt but could not in their position articulate”. Yet she reminds him he has written sensitively on Vaughan’s and Donne’s work. “Yes,” he replies, “because it’s excellent and fascinating. Not because I suddenly feel that Vaughan is a brother in the faith or that reading Donne converted me to a love of Christ.”
Goodman points out that he kneels at the Church altar on Sundays. Her husband, she says, is “communicant but resentful”.
“When did I say that?” says Hill.
“You didn’t, I just said it now.”
“It sounds like me.”
“I’ve been married to you for some years,” she says drily.
Geoffrey Hill: Like a cross between Michelangelo's Jeremiah and Father Christmas Photo: Clara Molden
Hill’s perceived political views are more likely to get him into hot water than any religious doubts. In Mercian Hymns he included the line, “To watch the Tiber foaming out much blood,” adapted from Virgil, but made infamous by Enoch Powell in his 1968 anti-immigration speech. Reviewing Hill in 1985, Paulin wrote: “It would be tempting to detect a Powelite strain in Hill’s conservatism.” The association pains Hill: “I feel angry and helpless and hopeless at being so misunderstood.” Since he feels no affinity with Powell why did he allude to him? “It’s a public utterance which by being made public is available for expressive use … I used it as an available piece of rhetoric in the structuring of a rhetorical pattern.” Alluding to the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell’s words about his torturer, Hill concludes: “Anyone who can make such an elementary gaffe when reading a poem and still insist on it seems to me not susceptible to reason.”
What are his politics? “I’ve described myself in public as a Ruskinian Tory, but adding: it is only Ruskinian Tories who sound like Marxists these days.” His work shows a deep sympathy for the suffering working classes of the 19th century. He commemorates the labours of his family in Mercian Hymns and 2005’s Scenes from Comus: “Severn-side blacksmiths and nailers who must have bled.” What about modern politics? “We’re free to vote for the oligarchs,” he says, “we’re free to vote for our jailers.” He believes much contemporary poetry is complicit with power. “The language they think of as democratic anti-elitist are really the scraps of the English language that have dropped from the feasting tables of the oligarchs. This sort of ordinary-language poetry isn’t democratic at all: it’s servile. Yes, servile.”
An Oxford lecture last year took to task the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy for suggesting that text messaging could be a useful medium for poetry. He also took a swipe at creative writing courses, saying that one of her poems “could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage”. Pretending to teach someone to write is a form of charlatanism, he believes. “If you’re giving people confidence in writing about what they know then whatever it is you’re doing it has nothing to do with poetry ... You’re providing a kind of therapy.”
Hill’s poetry is far from being ordinary-language. But he robustly defends his right to be obscure. “To say that a poet is to be condemned because she refers to the Diet of Worms and we don’t know what the Diet of Worms is – is it something on MasterChef? – or is inaccessible because she invokes some field of vision which we have difficulty in grasping: this seems to me a kind of crass bullying.” Kenneth Haynes, the editor of Broken Hierarchies, tells me via email that although you can look up the references, “the annotation isn’t the hard part with Hill’s poems … the difficulty only begins after looking things up”.
In any case, says Hill, you can always use Google. He, however, stays away from the online world. “I would just hate to be in thrall to the internet.” Goodman, by contrast, enthusiastically uses social media. During our conversation she snaps us with her phone and posts our photos on Facebook. Hill admits his wife “sometimes tells me what has been on Facebook, if she thinks it will interest me”.
Hill’s renaissance since 1996 has been attributed to antidepressants. I ask him about another source: George Eliot. In his essay “Redeeming the Time”, he picks holes in her 1868 political pamphlet written in the voice of the radical Felix Holt. What it excludes, wrote Hill, is the “antiphonal voice of the heckler” – a voice to question the author’s assumptions. “It was probably true that in thinking about George Eliot I discovered myself using a phrase like the ‘voice of the heckler’”, he admits. Indeed in later collections he has great fun heckling himself: he mocks his “Up the Hill Difficulty” (a nod to Bunyan); refers to himself as an “obnoxious chthonic old fart” (Paulin called him a “chthonic nationalist”); and says he can “out-rap” rappers, only he’s a “Bit short of puff these days”.
His attacks on the “Entertainment overkill” of modern culture speaks to what Heaney described as his “acute distress at the falling away of standards”. This often takes the form of a pungent grumpiness. In the poem “Broken Hierarchies”, from Without Title (2006), an English landscape is lashed by a storm: “the roadway sprouts ten thousand flowerets, / storm-paddies instantly reaped, replenished, / and again cut down”. Those flattened roadside flowers make an emblem of tawdry Britain. “I contrast hierarchy with hegemony,” Hill tells me. (“Bless hierarchy, dismiss hegemony, / Thus I grind to conclusion” he writes in his most recent sequence, The Daybooks.)
This elitist strain appeals to some and appals others. In some moods it’s just what I need. But I prefer what he earlier described as his “juxtapositions of the real and the surreal”: a world in which King Offa of Mercia is “overlord of the M5” and the Royalist musician William Lawes auditions at Ronnie Scott’s. “I try to make a distinction between enjoyment and joy,” says Hill. “You’re only prepared to enjoy what you already have a taste for: whereas joy is shocking and surprising”. What is most joyfully surprising in Hill’s poems (to me) is when he takes the moral landscape in broadest view. As he writes in The Triumph of Love, there is “igneous, sedimentary, / conglomerate”, but “particular grace, / individual love, decency, endurance, / are traceable across the faults”.
September Song
born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
Geoffrey Hill
September Song by Geoffrey Hill © 1994 taken from Selected Poems (Viking) at £9.99
Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 is published by OUP at £31.50
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