Heidegger and the Americans

Earlier this year the great Stanley Fish created a bit of a fuss in the New York Times with a few comments on Terry Eagleton’s book which is critical of the Dawkins/Hitchins stance on religion (they’re against it). The response on both sides was unusually shrill and rapidly descended into a childish game of name calling rather than addressing the issues that Fish had tried to raise. At the time I put this down to the strange relationship Americans have with religion and thought little more about it.

Now it’s happened again in response to a piece by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education on a book by Emmanuel Faye which examines the nature of the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazi ideology. The article is expressed in forthright terms, Heidegger is referred to as ‘a pretentious old Black Forest babbler’ and a buffoon, his philosophy is derided and Romano asserts that he should be the butt of jokes rather than dissertations.

The piece has elicited more responses than any other Chronicle article this year and the furore has now been reported in the New York Times. The comments range from those depicting Heidegger as a charlatan and a fake who ought to be ditched forthwith to Heidegger as the greatest and most influential thinker of the 20th century. There’s also a strand criticising Romano’s lack of intellectual rigour and a further strand criticising (in true academic fashion) the quality of the comments.

I can’t see this kind of thing happening in the UK- it’s not that we don’t care about this kind of stuff but we aren’t really prepared to enter into fist fights over it and I wonder what it is about the USA that encourages people to get so worked up. Could it be that this level of aggression  is a further symptom of the ultimate free market culture or is that too reductive? Or is it that Americans are more prepared to indulge in posture than to actually debate the issues?

There is a very serious debate to be had about philosophy, ideology and politics. In some cases ideologues have been known to appropriate philosophical ideas to give their political actions some additional credibility. It is well known that Heidegger was an arch-conservative with a strong authoritarian bent and that he was professionally ruthless. The Der Spiegel interview of 1967 shows this quite clearly. Hew also saw it as his mission to resurrect German culture from its fallen state.

I don’t entirely buy into the Goldhagen thesis that all of German society held an eliminationist position towards the Jews but I am prepared to accept that Germany between the wars was mired in the very worst kinds of antisemitism and that Martin Heidegger was a German who embraced those views. I’ve read the infamous Rectorship Address and bits of it make me wince- I don’t buy Heidegger’s much later assertion that he was simply trying to save the German university system. I think he was trying to feather his own nest by currying favour with the new regime. I also find it pathetic that he should spend so much time screwing many of his female students.

So, an odious character who we wouldn’t want to take out for a drink (the only criteria worth applying) but what about his work?  Heidegger had one great thought and many other lesser thoughts. He posed the question of Being which burst on the last century like a thunderbolt. This thought is great because it is blindingly simple and goes to the very heart of existence.  Undoing this thought is an impossible task, when you ask the question you let the genie out of the bottle and now it pervades almost every aspect of our cultural and social life. I’m happy to admit that the lesser thoughts are more prone to repudiation but we can’t (even if we really wanted to)  dispense with the question of Being.

The New York Times debate on Hitchins and Dawkins missed the point that Dawkins’ real target has always been relativists (like me) and that Hitchins is still a Trotskyist and his agenda will always be coloured by that fact. The correct atheist position, I would argue, is that people who believe in God are fundamentally but understandable mistaken and they should be left to get on with it.

As for Heidegger jokes, I’ve learned recently that the hut is more of a bungalow than a hut and that it isn’t actually in the trees but on the side of a valley. I’m also amused by the fact that he always wore an acorn in his lapel.

Ten questions for Geoffrey Hill

1. How did you destroy your marriage?
2. As we’ll never know what haemony means, why do you go on about it?
3. How do you feel about those people who refer to your later work  as ‘the Prozac stuff’?
4. Where did you get the idea from to do the Mercian Hymns in that way?
5. Did it feel like you were being raped by God?
6. What’s so great about Hopkins?
7. Does it bother you that no-one else shares your political views?
8. How well did you know Gillian Rose?
9. Does the atemwende that you use in the Orchards of Sion refer to the address or the book?
10. Are you the abused child in the Triumph of  Love?

Any others?

Catching up with Jeremy Prynne

I bought the Bloodaxe Prynne collection ten years ago following recommendations from people that I admire (Carol Rumens, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd). I started to read in expectation of something wonderful but found instead (apart from the very early stuff) a mass of words that made little sense and became increasingly perplexing with each reading. I did however note one very impressive poem dedicated to Paul Celan.
Lately I’ve been quite severely depressed and my normal source of consolation during recovery is to read Pepys’ diaries but on this occasion I finished the Arcades Project, re-read Boyd Hilton on 19th century England and then turned to Prynne.
I have to report that I have found the Prynne experience to be both frustrating and oddly involving, frustrating because initially some of the phrases don’t make any kind of sense but involving because the search for that sense leads you to think about the world and language in different ways. Reading Prynne has also led me to read Olson’s Maximus Letters (and for that I am profoundly grateful), Heidegger on poetry, Celan and Holderlin.
Whilst I can ‘hear’ the influence of Celan and late Beckett on Prynne I am totally deaf to the voice of Olson in his work even though Prynne is one of Olson’s biggest advocates and spent some time in the mid sixties trying to get the later parts of the Letters into a publishable format.
Prynne’s essay on Resistance and Difficulty is a densely worded argument that points out that every subject puts out various levels of resistance to being understood and that we experience difficulty when we encounter these resistances. He then goes on to say that it is the task of the imagination to gain access to ‘the resistance beyond our several difficulties’. Prynne ends with a quote from Rilke that he feels establishes his point about the quest for a fusion of resistance and difficulty. This seems fair enough to me and would seem to point out some kind of justification for the level of difficulty in Prynne’s work- which seems to be about using ‘difficult’ ways to speak about a world that is very resistant to our comprehension. Incidentally, in this essay Prynne refers fleetingly to the work of Gabriel Marcel. The only other person that I know who refers to Marcel is Geoffrey Hill, that other ‘difficult’ English poet.
I’ve been carrying the Prynne tome around with me and I’ve had a number of comments- “too obscure”, “too intellectual” and “the only poet that’s trying to do something different from the mediocrity that is English poetry but I only like the parts that aren’t incomprehensible”. I’d agree with all of these if I didn’t find reading him so absorbing and if I didn’t find re-reading the ‘incomprehensible’ bits so rewarding. After reading Resistance and Difficulty I then felt that I had to re-read Heidegger on the ‘Origins of the work of art’ which Prynne refers to (using the German title) as “brilliant”.
My relationship with Heidegger has changed a lot over the years. I started with ‘the greatest thinker of the 20th century’ view then moved on the “he was a Nazi but’ view rapidly followed by ‘Being and Time is brilliant but the rest is polluted by a weird kind of German mysticism’ view. My recent view is that worrying too much about the Being of beings is probably a waste of time but I am pleased that someone asked the question. My reading of the Origins this time around was disappointing. I don’t feel that poetry has a “privileged position in the domain of the arts” nor do I feel that “poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of beings”.I think poetry may be many things but Heidegger fails to convince me (by means of evidence) that it has this privileged position and power.
Still, Jeremy Prynne thinks that this essay is brilliant and I therefore assume that he shares its view and has incorporated this in some way into his practice. This then brings me to the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Should we view both activities as trying to tell some kind of truth? Has philosophy got anything to say poetry and vice versa? Are there dangers when poetry and philosophy get mixed up? I don’t have any kind of answer to these questions other than there is a real danger when any discipline tries to take itself too seriously.
In my attempts to make sense of Prynne, I’ve stuck with two poems- The Warring of the Clans and Word Order. I’ve been able to construe the subject matter in both but there are still bits that I’m falling over. I don’t understand how butter can be ‘bardic’ although I like the juxtaposition nor do I understand how a shadow can be ‘cardiac’ but that may be because I haven’t spent long enough with the OED.
The other question is should we all be following Prynne’s lead or should we be content to write in the ‘mediocre’ tradition? Is Prynne writing himself into obscure oblivion or will he be revered in fifty years time as the only serious English poet?
My view is that we all need to catch up with Prynne because his work is clever and radically different from anything else, I don’t think we should slavishly imitate him but allow his work to inform our own. With regard to posterity, I do hope he gets more notice than what passes for good in the current mainstream.

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Let’s start with the caveats. This is the first piece by Benjamin that I’ve read, prior to reading this I knew next to nothing about 19th century Paris and I acknowledge that what we have is incomplete. I also recognise that Benjamin is achingly trendy and has attained sainthood in some academic circles.
Having read it (and re-read certain sections), I have to say that it isn’t very good. The basic premise of the project is sound enough, bringing the 19th century into the ‘now’ of the 20th so that we may awaken
from the dream/nightmare that was the 19th century is perfectly reasonable. The format, a compendia or montage of quotes interspersed with observations from Benjamin, is also an interesting notion. The problem is that it doesn’t actually work either as a work of history or of criticism.
The theory that Benjamin deploys, ‘dialectics at a standstill’, isn’t a dialectic- the prime ingredient of which is flow or process. To take the notion of movement out of a dialectical analysis is to render it worthless. For a man who admired and befriended Lukacs and who worked with Adorno and Horkheimer, this is very strange indeed. Less weird is Benjamin’s attempt to move culture up a rung or two in the Marxist model of the way the world works. This has been a pipe dream of many bourgeois critics and thinkers since the turn of the century and marks a reluctance to understand the Marxist point that everything derives from economic relationships. Benjamin recognises this departure from orthodoxy but still seems to think that he can retain a Marxist framework. He can’t and he doesn’t.
I appreciate that everyone chooses their sources as they see fit and the following observations reflect my own prejudices and inclinations. Their is far too much time and space devoted to Charles Baudelaire. I admit that I don’t like Baudelaire’s brand of miserablism, nor do I like the man. I first read Baudelaire in the mid-seventies and found his stuff utterly forgettable, at Benjamin’s prompting I’ve read him again with the same reaction. In this book Benjamin doesn’t make a case for Baudelaire (although he may do elsewhere) but contents himself with lengthy quotations and biographical snippets. The other problem is that I don’t feel that this poor little rich boy rake is all that representative of the 19th century.
The are no women in the Arcades Project except as objects of desire or as shoppers and they don’t get a ‘voice’. This may be symptomatic of the 1930s when it was still acceptable to exclude half the human race from most things but it is still very disappointing, especially when the references to women as objects of desire are a bit perverse.
Also absent is the working class except for two brief references to rag pickers and a glancing reference made by Auguste Blanqui to the class composition at the barricades. Michel Foucault once said “Marxism fits that nineteenth century like goldfish fit into a goldfish bowl” by this he meant that the early industrial period formulated and consolidated class positions in the way that Marx describes. The proletariat obviously have a key role in this process and Benjamin shouldn’t have ignored them. The working class, as ever, also formed the bulk of the population during this period. I can’t accept that there wasn’t the French equivalent of Henry Mayhew writing in Paris
Benjamin expostulates on the link between fashion and death, this strikes me as overly romantic and a little sentimental. There is a perfectly good class-based explanation for why fashion is the way it is. This explanation holds true to this day and it speaks volumes that Benjamin didn’t use it. He does make a sneering reference to one work as being ‘class-bound’ but the absence of any class analysis is a serious omission.
We now come to the figure of the flaneur. I may not know much about Paris but I did know about flaneurs and flanerie prior to reading this book. I don’t know how I arrived at this knowledge but it’s been in my head for at least the last twenty years. I was therefor delighted to find that Benjamin devotes a whole section to this almost mythical figure. The extended definition given by Benjamin is at serious variance with mine. We both agree that the flaneur is an aimless stroller but the Benjamin starts to give this stroller a much more active part, someone who can spot criminals in the crowd, someone who studies the faces of individuals in the crowd, someone who compulsively window shops in the arcades. My definition is, in essence, a stroller who is in the crowd but not of the crowd someone who (to quote Fournel) gives himself over, with all his senses and all his mind, to the spectacle. That is flanerie for me, I’m not saying that I am right and that Benjamin is wrong, merely suggesting that you can say anything you want to with the right quotes.
In conclusion, the sheer size of the book and the variety of subjects made me want to keep on reading to the bitter end and when I’d finished it I did want to argue with it so it can’t be that bad.

Andrew Marvell and planting the bergamot

Marvell’s poetry doesn’t seem very popular these days except for ‘To his coy mistress’ which is one of the finest love poems in the English language. This is a pity because some of his other stuff is very good indeed. I’m particularly fond of ‘Upon Appleton House’ but here I wish to draw attention to ‘An Horatian ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland’.
This is a political poem and it is very, very clever. The civil wars of the 17th century carry all sorts of baggage in English culture and I’m wary of imposing modern values on that contested period. The poem was written in the three week period between Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland and his journey north to do battle with the Scots. The ode celebrates Cromwell as the decisive man of action and urges him on to defeat the Scots. However the poem also paints a very positive picture of Charles I on the scaffold and also hints that Cromwell may want the crown for himself. There is also presented as fact the suspicion that Cromwell engineered Charles’ flight from Hampton Court so as to hasten his execution.
Critics have argued over whether the poem was written in support of Cromwell or Charles but I don’t think that this is the issue. I think it is a sophisticated study of power and of the effects that power has on individual men. The stanzas set out below are the first in the poem to suggest that this may be more than just a song of praise:

Who, from his private garden, where
He lived reserved and austere,
As if his highest plot,
to plant the bergamot.

Could by industrious valour climb
to ruin the great work of time.
and cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould.

I needed Nigel Smith in the excellent Longman edition Of Marvell’s poetry to tell that a bergamot is a type of pear considered to be the pear of kings. These lines more than hint at Cromwell being a man of immense personal ambition wants to destroy the past and seize the crown for himself. I don’t think that to accuse someone of ruining the great work of time is particularly complimentary.
Marvell is particularly effective (and direct) as to Cromwell’s ’skill’ in engineering Charles’ move from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight-

Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
That Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrook’s narrow case:

That thence the royal actor born
The tragic scaffold might adorn,

Smith tells us that this view of Cromwell’s role was fairly commonplace at the time but I don’t think anyone expressed it more succinctly than Marvell. I’m particularly fond of ‘twining subtle fears with hope’ as it sums up how you would persuade somebody to do something against their best interests. It doesn’t lessen the strength of these lines that Cromwell was entirely innocent of this accusation- they reflect what people thought at the time.
I won’t add to the heap of stuff that’s been written about the description of Charles’ behaviour on the scaffold other than to note that it has an elegiac, haunting quality that is absent from the rest of the poem.
Cromwell had just returned from Ireland where he had committed atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford, Marvell’s reference to this campaign takes up a mere four lines-

And now the Irish are ashamed
To see themselves in one year tamed.
So much can one man do,
That does both act and know.

Of course the Irish were never tamed and the brutality of this campaign continues as a running sore to this day. I’ve long held a theory that the English don’t really care about Ireland and I think these four lines epitomise that kind of willful ignorance that’s been around for centuries. Incidentally, the Scots don’t come off much better in the poem.
The last six lines of the poem show just how clever Marvell is. Smith glosses these as a warning to be wary of those defeated who may come seeking revenge. My view is that these lines point out that Cromwell, who has won power by killing others, must go on killing ad infinitum purely because the is that position that the various power matrices have put him in-

And for the last effect
Still keep the sword erect:

Besides the force it has to fight
The spirits of the shady night;
The same arts that did gain
A pow’r must it maintain.

Poem on the recession

This is a poem by Vimalesh Kumar. Vimalesh is from Kerala in India and is currently working in Muscat, Oman. Vimalesh has so far written just a few poems in English.

Recession

Oh recession you come to this crowd
Like a blackbird singing in a calming night

You threw our nights in filthy water
You swallowed our happy mornings
You took our bagpipe and castle

Oh recession you are so cruel
You dried our gardens, our dreams
You brought summer in your hand
You swore ice in cold, rain in water

Oh recession you come like hurricane
You hold our ways to sky and sea
You put our flights in dark clouds
You shake our island and wiped

Oh recession you come at right
You took us hard to restrict
You made us to believe in god
You stopped our hurry tides

Oh recession you are true
You shown us mere and myth
You bargain on our dreams
You make us to live for a future

Oh recession you are so proud
You save our children to live
You teach them to live in the real

You took their wheels to walk

Oh recession you are so humble
You made us to thank for goodness
You made us not to be pompous
You made us to survive in troubles
You opened our eyes to the future.

Claiming Paul Celan

I’ve just spent a week or so with ‘Wordtraces’ which was edited by Aris Fioretos and published in 1994. It’s a collection of critical essays on Celan’s work and it strikes me that there are a number of competing schools of thought that are vying for the right to claim Celan as one of their own. This is perfectly understandable given his place in the European canon together with his terse and difficult style. The claims arise mostly from what is known about his interests so existentialism and the work of Martin Heidegger takes some priority, there’s also claims made for Jewish mysticism.
Celan’s biography produces a number of narratives- the Holocaust survivor, the only child whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, the Jew in exile, the translator, the husband and father, the poet whose mother tongue was the same as the nation that destroyed his people, the author of Todesfugue which showed that art was possible after the holocaust, the devotee of Heidegger who followed his work even as it descended into mysticism, the intellectual who took an increasing interest in Jewish mysticism, the depressive who threw himself into the Seine at the age of 49.
From my perspective all of these are valid in that they give us some insight into some of the poems but I think there’s also a danger that some of these can be over read for stuff that may not be there. Much is made of the Meridian address given in Bremen but in that Celan is also being willfully obscure. Much is also made of the later phase of the poetry which is seen by some as inferior to the earlier stuff. I would wish to put forward a counter-argument with an example of one particular later poem that makes sense to me.
In the late sixties there was a view that reduction was good, that the task of the artist (in any genre) was to distill complex and profound ideas into their essential components. Their was also an acknowledgment that to do this would risk falling into silence. Celan refers to this risk in the Meridian address, he also talks of the poem in relation to its Other which would sem to imply that the poem must become ’strange’.
Samuel Beckett (a Celan admirer) published ‘Sans’ in 1969 which attempted to sum up the human condition in as few words as possible. I think that this shows that Celan wasn’t entirely alone in producing sparse and pared-down lyrics and that his later poems were more ‘mainstream’ than is now imagined.
I recognised this aspect in both Beckett and Celan in my late teens and felt instinctively that their approach epitomised the best of European literature, I did not need to know about Celan’s interest in Jewish mysticism nor Beckett’s love of cricket. I was just grateful that writers of stature were proceeding in this way.
The poem below is from Fadensonnen which was published in 1968. The translator is Michael Hamburger and the poem is the only poem about depression that treats its subject with the insightful objectivity that it deserves. Only Paul Celan could have written this-
…..AND NO KIND OF
Peace

Grey nights, foreknown to be cool.
Stimulus dollops, otter-like,
over consciousness gravel
on their way to little memory bubbles.

Grey-within-grey of substance.

A half-pain, a second one with no
lasting trace, half-way
here. A half desire.
Things in motion, things occupied.

Cameo
Of compulsive repetition.

As a depressive, I may be reading too much into this but I think it captures the essential features of a depressive episode without making it unduly miserable or exotic. The opening lines nicely portray the unremitting quality of depression. The play on ‘half’ captures the desensitising effects and compulsive repetition expresses the fear we all have of the next episode.
So, there may be multiple meanings in Celan’s work and his choice of words may at times be deliberately misleading but at least he risked the silence.

Paul Celan and the perfect poem

Many, many people have written about Celan but most of it is as ‘difficult’ as the poetry itself so I’m going to try to be as clear as possible. I started with Michael Hamburger’s translations of 1970 or thereabouts when I was in my mid-teens. The initial attraction of the later poems were they were short and sparse and seemed to be saying something profound. I bought Hamburger expanded selection in the early nineties and then bought the Felstiner biography and translations.
Celan rose to fame with ‘Todesfugue’ which is a poem written in response to the Holocaust. This is referred to by many critics as the response to Adorno’s view that there can be no art after Auschwitz. Whilst Todesfugue is a brilliantly angry response to the Nazi regime and made Celan’s name as a poet it is not as significant as his later work which is praised by some as being the towering achievement of 20th century literature and derided by others as too obscure and relentlessly difficult.
What I like about most of the late stuff is that I get more from it with each reading and the poems that mean the most to me have over the years attached themselves to the inside of my skull. I have carried this with me since I was fifteen-
Go blind now, today:
eternity is also full of eyes
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of the words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.
To my mind, this is so beautiful that to speak of what it may be about is almost irrelevant but I think we can surmise that it alludes to the creative process especially when you consider what Celan said in the Meridian address. Here he speaks of the poem holding on to the edge of itself and following its ‘inmost nature, presentness and presence’.
It appears to me that Celan was concerned in creating the poem that was free of poetry, the perfect poem that almost stands outside of language, on the brink of silence. This, of course, is laden with risk and it is to Celan’s credit that he dedicated himself to this pursuit through bouts of depression and increasing critical derision.
The perfect poem never arrived but along the way Celan created enough attempts to inspire the rest of us to follow in his path.

Geoffrey Hill and language

This again is an interim report on Hill’s critical writings. It must be said that there are aspects of Hill’s thinking that are attractive to me. He dislikes Sylvia Plath’s “cruel psychopathologising”  of her dead father and Robert Lowell’s use of personal letters about the break up of his marriage. He makes the arch observation that there is no automatic parity between the depth of the suffering and the quality of a poem.

My issue with Plath and  Lowell is somewhat different, Plath can write about her dead father if she wants to but she should not have infllicted  her mental illness on the rest of us because mental illness isn’t interesting. She may be guilty of cruel psychpathologising but the greater sin is in thinking that the state of her mental health is worth expressing in a poem. It isn ‘t, so I’m arguing on the grounds of taste whereas Hill is using morality to make a similar point.

The situation with Lowell is a  little more complex. Hill clearly feels that Lowell’s earlier poetry is much better than the later works. I would find it hard to dissent from this and would point to “The  Mills of the Kavanaghs” as his finest poem. The use of the letters is a well-worn battleground and I am surprised that Hill chooses this rather than Lowell’s use of the confessional mode  in general to condemn.  The persistent throwaway references to being unwell belie a man who excuses his sins and then expects te rest of us to forgive him. “Skunk Hour”  is an example of a vastly overrated poem with a malevolent vein running right through it. In short, I’d be happier if Hill had criticised Lowell for being a weak poet and for giving bipolar a worse name than it already has.

The essay ‘Language, Suffering and Silence’ also contains this:

“I would seriously propose a theology of language; and a primary exercise to be undertaken towards its establishment. This would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming a) that the shock of a semantic recognition must also be a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one of its minor but far from trivial types, b) that the art and literature of the late twentieth centur require a memorialising, a memorising of the dead as much as, or even more than, ‘expressions of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed’.

Hill goes on to suggest that the best way solidarity can be expressed is by the giving of alms and quotes Hopkins extolling the virtues of alms-giving to Robert Bridges.

This paragraph took my breath away when I first read it and I was instantly ready to sign up to the G Hill Church of poetic endeavour.  I then read it again and the doubts began to creep in. Semantic shock is very much what poetry should be about because poetry frees us up to inflict these shocks upon the reader and thus to encourage a different was of looking at the world. Semantic shock being also ethical shock is much more problematic, I can only think of Paul Celan who achieves this, and places an immense burden on the shoulders of verse.  As for this being the action of grace, I’m afraid that Hill is ascribing too much importance to the creative  act.

With regard memorialising the dead over expressing solidarity with the oppressed, Hill has written many in memoriam poems in his career and that’s all well and good but I don’t think it should stop the rest of us expressing solidarity if we want to. I’m against the self-pitying misery school of poetry but I have no problem with poems that are politically engaged and engaging.

One more point, in ‘Translating Value’ Hill quotes himself:

“A poet who possesses   such near-perfect pitch is able to sound out his own conceptual discursive intelligence……[He]  is hearing words in depth and is therefore hearing, or sounding, histroy and morality in depth.”

Hearing words in depth encapsulates what we should all be trying to do but very, very few actually achieve. I think Hill here has hit the poetic nail on the head.

Geoffrey Hill- a personal view

I’m approaching this with some trepidation. Many more qualified and erudite people have commented on Hill’s work and I am painfully aware of my own inferiority in terms of education and reading. However, in recent years I’ve spent a llot of time with Hill’s poetry and have recently read his criticism. What follows is an ‘ordinary’ reader’s account of what Hill has to say and the various ways in which he says it.

I’d tried to read Hill about twenty years ago but found the density of language too dense and formidable. I gave him another go in 2005 when he published ‘Scnes from Comus’. I was attracted to this by a rave review from Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian and also by the fact that I was familiar with ‘Comus’ and hoped that Hill might have something interesting to say about Milton’s poem.

Hill’s Comus made me smile, here was a poet clearly confident in his gifts and taking great delight in that confidence. I enjoyed his dexterity and his ability to nail the right phrase at the right time. He also quotes himself  as if tracking back to other brilliant turns of phrase. As for the subject matter, Comus is only tangenitally about Milton’s poem but does contain enough allusions for me to want to argue back (a good sign).  I was smitten and have read this collection many times since.

Geoffrey Hill has since become part of my ‘central’ reading list along with Milton, Spenser and Marvell. I haven’t yet acquired all his poetry so the following is a partial view of the great man.

Hill has a reputation for difficulty. This is entirely justified but it’s a strange kind of difficulty. Most of the poems are littered with references to other writers and their works- half of the pleasure of a Hill poem is in tracking down  those asides. This in itself isn’t all that odd- poets do it all the time- but what is disconcerting is that Hill abhors getting to his point. Most poems seem to contain small bits of meaning along the way rather than a clear theme. The meaning then becomes the summation of those constituent points. Another problem is that Hill’s themes tend to be quite arcane. No doubt Hill would argue that they only appear arcane in our overly materialistic culture. The other problem is that these poems are not written for an audience- Hill writes primarily for himself and is thus free to make few concessions to the reader.

Hill loves language. His criticism is littered with closely argued expositions on the meaning of indivual words at certain periods in history. His poetry is a celebration of the diversity and strength of language. I refuse to believe that anyone can have such an extensive vocabulary and am currently trying to spot which words he’s looked up in the OED prior to using. It’s a good game.

Hill is a committed Christian. His faith allows him to write movingly about figures such as Robert Southwell and Henry Vaughan. I am sure that he’s entirely comfortable with the ‘prophet’ mantle that others have given him. Hill’s faith should not however deter the lay reader- the religious bits are often beautifully done but you don’t have to agree with them.

It is possible to argue with Geoffrey Hill. In ‘Orchards of Sion’ he makes several references to ‘Atemwende’ and has several goes at elucidating its meaning. ‘Atemwende’ is the title of a collection of poems by Paul Celan and it means ‘breathturn’. I’m not happy with Hill’s various renditions of the meaning of ‘turn’ and feel that he misleads the reader. In ‘Comus’ Hill worries about the word ‘haemony’ which may be an allusion to the fact that we’ll never know what Milton meant by it but it kind of gets in the way.

Geoffrey Hill can be tender and humane. His poem about Gillian Rose  is moving and respectful in a way that she would have appreciated. It also shows that he’s read ‘Loves Work’ which must be impressive.

Geoffrey Hill has had mental health problems. From the one reference to lithium in the poetry, I take it that he’s bipolar. Hill’s poetry can be gloomy but he’s never written (as far as I can tell) from the depths of depression. Some critics seem to make much of Hill’s late productivity and put this down to finding the right treatment.  I don’t think it works like that, the tone of the later work may be more bright but that’s probably due to confidence rather than medication.

Hill tells jokes in his poems, most of them aren’t very funny.

Geoffrey Hill can be a complete bitch. When Hill doesn’t like something he can be both nasty and scathing. He’s also an elitist snob who doesn’t like anything that may have mass appeal.

Without doubt Geoffrey Hill is the best poet currently writing in English. Everyone should get to know him.