50 - Hill

Summary

Geoffrey Hill is widely regarded as the greatest English poet of the period 1950 to the present (many would say the greatest English-language poet). This claim rests on a unique range of qualities: the seriousness and intensity of his poetry; its intellectual depth and sensuous vividness; its melding of high thought, evocative description and wry humour; its profound engagement with many of the traditions of English poetry (as well as aspects of European and American poetry); its combination (over nearly sixty years and twelve major volumes) of formal experiment and creative development with continuity of ethical and aesthetic principles. His essays, though less frequently admired and less influential than his poetry, are of a depth, scope and originality to place them in the company of those critical writings of great poets, such as Coleridge and Eliot, which can inform our reading of their poetry, but also of all poetry, by the interaction they exhibit between creative and critical thought. But, above all, Hill’s reputation rests on the sheer power of his words. He achieves effects of sublime beauty, of agonising sorrow, of tragic indignation, of complex abstract thought, even of self-mockery, bitterness, reproach, unmatched by any other poet of our age. There are some readers and critics who dislike Hill’s poetry, for what they take to be his political or aesthetic stance, or because they regard his poetry as excessively mannered or misanthropic, but his mastery of technique is hard to deny; and, for Hill, technique and ethics are one.

A crucial aspect of Hill’s importance as a poet is his seriousness. This does not mean lack of humour: a strong comic vein is a submerged presence in the early work and very evident in the later. Nor does it mean portentousness or self-importance, though these are hostile misreadings to which his seriousness may be liable. Rather it means that Hill regards the poet’s responsibility to and for language as a matter of ethical and political import, and regards the poet as, in this sense, not a leader or legislator (he rebukes Pound for this delusion in ‘Our Word is our Bond’), but as exemplary (a key word in Hill’s ethics).