Book Review

Poetry’s serious endeavour

Geoffrey Hill: collected critical writings

The Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin famously developed a theory of "speech acts". His doctrine, very roughly, was that in speaking, one may be performing an action. To say "I will" was in certain contexts to enter into a marriage contract; to say "guilty" was not to express an opinion, but to convict someone of a crime. But what are a poet's "speech acts"? What sort of action does a poet perform? Austin had an answer to that which was curiously banal. Under "speech acts not seriously performed" he included "acting a play or making a joke or writing a poem". In several of these essays Geoffrey Hill shows that he respects Austin, but Hill's central endeavour is to develop an understanding, rather deeper than Austin's, of what poetry does and how it is serious.

Hill's remarkably rich, even dense explorations of context - historical, theological, philosophical - are devoted to this end. His essay "The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert Southwell" examines Southwell as Jesuit, as poet, as pleader for a reasonableness unseasonal in the times in which he lived and, finally, as martyr. Jesuits were expected to be immersed in the Ignatian method of "composition" the culmination of which was the sensuous imagining of Christ's Passion. Southwell was very good at all this sensuous imagining in the tradition of the metaphysical conceit. His most famous poem, "The Burning Babe", is all conceits, a baby made up of symbolic opposites, fire and ice, justice and mercy. But amid all this the babe is "pretty" and "bright" because his suffering is redemptive.

Southwell can write of the "rent and dismembered" body of the martyr which is transfigured through the grace it conveys. Hill seems to suggest that this is not a commonplace because it is part of a continuous narrative in which Southwell's own dismemberment on the scaffold is itself transfiguring: "a work of art of supreme beauty". His sensuous imagining of passion, as priest and poet, enabled him to comprehend his own.

Virtually all these essays are about how language can be responsive and hence responsible. Hill has a doctrine, not easy to understand, of the erotic in literature. It is an erotics of language, and denotes "the power that can be felt ... when a word or half-finished phrase awaits its consummation". I would guess that this has some affinity with Plato's idea of intellectual enquiry being "erotic" and even with the imagery used by religious mystics to describe union with God. Anyway, Hill's erotic heroes include T.S. Eliot, F.H. Bradley and Pope. Presumably he is thinking of the Pope of exquisite sensibility: "the spider's touch, how exquisitely fine,/ Feels at each thread and lives along the line" rather than the Pope of complacent certainties: "Why has not man a telescopic eye? /The answer's simple, man is not a fly." The T.S. Eliot of "Marina" and Ash-Wednesday is erotic, but not the Eliot prosily haranguing the reader in parts of Four Quartets.

As a poet Hill sees the need for poetry to address public life, even as he continually makes ironic the process of addressing the public. This was something that Pound notoriously got wrong when he presumed on a poetic privilege to preach stupid certainties and crazy hatreds in his notorious wartime broadcasts extolling Fascism. The apparently unbuttoned Whitman had a more consistent, truer discipline.

Eliot wrote that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior. Geoffrey Hill's poetry has always revealed an exceptionally active, critical intelligence, a vigilance which has certainly not relaxed with his extraordinary critical flowering in recent years. (Since 1997 he has produced seven volumes. Between 1958 and 1983 he produced five.) He brings an analogous sense of responsibility to his explorations of Swift, Dryden, the Cambridge Platonists, Jonson, Tyndale, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and Eliot - to name only a few of the subjects that come under his scrutiny in this wonderfully varied collection of essays. It is not just that there is a breadth of interests hardly paralleled by any contemporary critic. One has a sense of a powerful intellectual and spiritual centre, an inner coherence, a philosophy that grows out of a continuously intelligent engagement with the culture.

After all, the poet's speech acts can indeed be related to actions. Hill notes another critic's suggestion that Donne forbids us to "make any simple equation between the truth of imagination and the truth of experience". Robert Southwell did make just such an equation. His end was the scaffold: Donne's the deanship of St Paul's. Hill's exploration of the responsibilities language imposes on us, or that we impose on ourselves through language, helps us to understand how to accept or refuse that equation is a choice that is both intelligible and serious.

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