Geoffrey Hill

256 Pages·2012·1.49 MB·English

by  Chris Keene

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Geoffrey Hill: Poetry, Criticism and Philosophy

Alex Pestell
DPhil
University of Sussex
September 2011
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Acknowledgements

My thanks to Keston Sutherland, whose guidance, support, and meticulous feedback over
the course of this thesis has been invaluable. My thanks also to Brian Cummings, who gave
useful advice in the early stages of this project.

I’m grateful to the staff at Leeds University Library for their help with the Geoffrey Hill
archive.

For their conversation, advice and good cheer over the course of this project thanks are due
to Christoforos Diakoulakis, Alex Howard, Seda Ilter, Ben Jones, Michael Kindellan,
Angelos Koutsourakis, Anthony Leaker, Peter Nicholls, Richard Parker, Ben Pestell, Karen
Schaller, David Tucker, and Karen Veitch.

Finally my thanks to my parents and my grandparents for their patience, encouragement
and support.
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UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
ALEX PESTELL DPHIL
GEOFFREY HILL: POETRY, CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY
SUMMARY

This thesis examines the role played by philosophy in the poetry and criticism of Geoffrey
Hill. Despite countless references to philosophy throughout Hill’s critical authorship, there
exists no study of any length on this vital aspect of his thought. Through close readings of
his poetry, criticism, and archival material, I attempt to demonstrate that philosophy has
played a more crucial role in Hill’s work than has hitherto been assumed.
Hill’s sceptical attitude to philosophy is intimately connected with his
understanding of poetry as a sensate form of cognition. My thesis examines the ways Hill’s
poetry and criticism responds to the challenges imposed upon this scepticism by a tradition
of philosophy that emphasises the importance of the aesthetic to its analyses of modernity’s
contradictions. I argue that a tradition of Anglophone Idealist thinkers, from S.T. Coleridge,
via T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, to Gillian Rose, is of sustained relevance to Hill’s work,
shaping the way he thinks about politics, ethics and literature.
In particular, German Idealism’s attempts to negotiate universality and particularity
via an emphasis on the aesthetic bases of critical thought lay the groundwork for an
understanding of poetry as a mode of cognition. Reading Hill’s poetry from For the
Unfallen to Oraclau/Oracles, I try to show the ways in which problems traditionally
conceived of as philosophical can be cognised in prosody and syntax. In part a vindication
of Hill’s elevation of poetry over philosophy, these readings also show the degree to which
Hill’s ‘craft of vision’ is indebted to conceptual and aesthetic models supplied by
philosophy.
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Contents

List of abbreviations ............................................................................................................... 5
Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 6
1. ‘Vision’ as the domain of poetry .................................................................................... 7
2. Anglophone Idealism’s dissatisfaction with modernity ............................................... 15
3. Poetry’s dissatisfaction with modernity ....................................................................... 22
SECTION I: COLERIDGE’S INFLUENCE ................................................................................ 36
Chapter 1: Imagination ..................................................................................................... 37
1. Lyric as diagnosis ......................................................................................................... 39
2. The imagination’s role in subjective aesthetic reflection ............................................. 45
3. Imagination and the common sense ............................................................................. 53
Chapter 2: The Drama of Reason ..................................................................................... 66
1. The ‘drama of reason’ .................................................................................................. 66
2. Coleridge’s aesthetics and literary criticism ................................................................ 78
3. Living Powers .............................................................................................................. 85
4. Sensus communis: a ‘decaying sense’ .......................................................................... 92
SECTION II: VICTORIAN IDEALISM AND OBJECTIVITY .................................................... 100
Chapter 3: Art of Judgement .......................................................................................... 101
1. The role of legislative metaphors in philosophical and poetic judgement ................. 105
2. What is Popular Philosophy? ..................................................................................... 113
3. Popular philosophy as impediment to poetic thought ................................................ 120
Chapter 4: ‘The strife of phrase’ .................................................................................... 130
1. Wavering thought ....................................................................................................... 130
2. What is a Bradleian poem? ........................................................................................ 140
3. Optional / obligatory music and its role in judgement ............................................... 144
4. Ephemeral thought ..................................................................................................... 157
SECTION III: WORDS AND THINGS ................................................................................... 170
Chapter 5: Performative Speech..................................................................................... 171
1. The example of Ezra Pound ....................................................................................... 174
2. Speech-acts ................................................................................................................. 180
3. The diagnostic word in Hill, Pound, and Austin ........................................................ 184
4. Blindness and stultification ........................................................................................ 194
5. Words and things ....................................................................................................... 202
Chapter 6: Poetry and Value .......................................................................................... 214
1. Intrinsic value ............................................................................................................. 215
2. Civil Power and Intrinsic Value ................................................................................. 223
3. ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’ ..................................................................................... 231
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 239
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 248
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List of abbreviations

C Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996)

CCW Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008)

CP Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)

LL The Lords of Limit (London: André Deutsch, 1984)

O Oraclau / Oracles (Thame: Clutag Press, 2010)

OS The Orchards of Syon (London: Penguin, 2002)

SC Scenes from Comus (London: Penguin, 2005)

SS Speech! Speech! (London: Penguin, 2001)

T1 A Treatise of Civil Power (Thame: Clutag Press, 2005)

T2 A Treatise of Civil Power (London: Penguin, 2007)

TL The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1999)

WT Without Title (London: Penguin, 2006)
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INTRODUCTION

What follows is a study of the role philosophy plays in the work of Geoffrey Hill.
Philosophy is often presented by Hill as ancillary or even antithetical to poetry. Poetry is, or
ought to be, ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’: a matter of the instinctual apprehension of
sensate particulars.1 By contrast, philosophy is suspected of flattening out the granular
surface of lived experience in the name of a systematic model of this experience.
Philosophy might offer coordinating perspectives in Hill’s work, as when F.H. Bradley is
quoted in the epigraphs to Hill’s Collected Critical Writings and Without Title, or when
Simone Weil stands at the head of ‘The Pentecost Castle’, but in the main its role in what
Hill calls ‘the craft of vision’ – the effort to obtain critical purchase on objective truth – is
downplayed.2 Perhaps for this reason, critics have not yet produced any study, book
chapter, article or monograph devoted to understanding Hill’s relationship to philosophy.
Briefly, the argument in this thesis is not only that philosophy warrants this kind of
attention, but that Hill’s conception of poetic ambition, of what poetry can and should strive
to achieve, rests to a large extent on concepts and practices supplied by philosophy.
Moreover, I will argue that Hill’s investment in philosophy is in fact committed to a
particular tradition, that of an Anglophone Idealism derived from German Idealism. This is
a tradition about which Hill has written at some length: most obviously in his essays on
T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley, but also in occasional meditations on the thought of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and Gillian Rose. But my evidence for Hill’s commitment to this tradition

1 Blake Morrison, ‘Under Judgment’, New Statesman 2551 (1980), 212-4, at 212. Hill is quoting Milton, ‘Of
Education’.
2 See CCW vii, WT vii, CP 137.
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will be drawn not just from a study of Hill’s critical commentary upon these writers, but
from close readings of his prose style and his poetry, in order to demonstrate the impact of
Anglophone Idealism upon the texture of his writing. In reading the syntax and prosody of
Hill’s criticism and poetry in the light of the ideas developed by Coleridge, Green, Bradley,
and Rose, I hope to disclose a far greater reliance upon philosophy’s modes of cognition
than heretofore suspected.
The rest of this introduction considers in what ways poetry and philosophy might be
thought to inhabit overlapping domains of inquiry. In particular, it focuses upon the ways in
which both poetry and philosophy, through a diagnosis of contradictions and an imagining
of alternatives to contemporary experience, express a dissatisfaction with modernity. It
offers some theoretical context, setting out the main outlines of the philosophical tradition
in which I argue Hill’s work is most invested. It then offers a detailed close reading of an
early Geoffrey Hill poem in an attempt to demonstrate what a philosophical poem might
look like from the point of view of its syntax and prosody, rather than from the point of
view of any content which might be taken to be philosophic. First, though, I will briefly
consider some of the concepts, attitudes, and practices at stake in Hill’s poetic practice as
they bear upon philosophy.

1. ‘Vision’ as the domain of poetry

What is the status of visions in Hill’s work? On occasion, as here in ‘Of Commerce and
Society’ (CP 46-51), Hill betrays a deep suspicion for the claims of the visionary:
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Statesmen have known visions. And, not alone,
Artistic men prod dead men from their stone:
Some of us have heard the dead speak:
The dead are my obsession this week

But may be lifted away.
(CP 49)

This suspicion is audible in the poem’s metre. The first stanza begins with two lines of
pentameter, but almost immediately the trochees of the first sentence come up against the
rhythmic ambiguity of ‘have known’. The emphasis might rest on either syllable. If it rests
on the ‘have’, the sentence appears defensive or regally insistent: politicians have known
visions, whatever others might say. Alternatively, it might be read with the emphasis on
‘known’, in which case the weight is more equally distributed, and suggests some kind of
narrative. In what way have statesmen ‘known visions’? How is this different from the
visionary experiences attributed to prophets and artists? But the issue isn’t seriously
considered, or is assumed as incontrovertible fact, for a new sentence importunately breaks
into the rhythm: ‘And, not alone, / Artistic men prod dead men from their stone’. A claim
for artistic vision opportunistically butts in, rather as the molossus ‘men prod dead’
interrupts the presiding rhythm. We then hear the voice of artistic connoisseurship as the
following lines relax into irregular tetrameters, padded out by unstressed syllables to
reinforce the informality of the occasion. ‘Some of us have heard the dead speak’ coyly
hints at arcane knowledge, but makes light of the affair the better to impress the audience; it
comes across as the diction of a creative writing veteran vaunting his vatic status. No
wonder Jeffrey Wainwright can write of this passage, ‘No sooner has the speaker pretended
to visionary knowledge than the claim is undermined, trashed even, by a scepticism that
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sees it as an affectation, something like a nervous headache’.3 Vision, here, is barely
distinguishable from narcissism.
However, Hill’s scepticism is not impervious to the seductions of the visionary
tradition. In a much later poem, ‘On Reading Milton and the English Revolution’, occurs a
line which is suggestive for Hill’s understanding of poetry’s role in modernity: ‘The craft of
vision is what I make of this’. Vision, on this account, clearly has a role to play in Hill’s
‘craft’. Note, here, how vision’s status is downgraded to a contingent, spontaneous object
of artifice rather than a heaven-sent gift: art is subjective, provisional, and not subordinate
to any pre-existing universal concept, category or criterion. This is a familiar position in the
theories of continental aesthetics, from Hegel onwards. 4 No longer subject to the
coordinating authorities of the church and monarchy, art acquires a degree of autonomy,
and with it the privilege of critical distance. That Hill conceives of this distance as critical,
and not just as the expulsion of art into the domain of the pastime or the decorative, is
suggested by his use of the theologically-loaded ‘vision’. Vision suggests a faculty more
transcendent than simple sight, though close natural observation is a staple of Hill’s poetic
gestural repertoire. Hill has written that ‘“vision” is too commonly taken to mean effortless,
unimpeded rapture’ (CCW 318), and it will become clear that a deep suspicion of the
unimpeded intellect is a recurrent feature of Hill’s authorship. But in a paradox that will be
frequently encountered in what follows, vision, as a diagnostic grasp of some objective

3 Jeffrey Wainwright, Acceptable Words: Essays on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005), 19.
4 See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
i, 51. For more recent examples, see J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to
Derrida and Adorno (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) and Gerald L. Bruns, On the
Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).