An engrossing study of the cultural politics of modern British poetry could be written through the prism of the late Geoffrey Hill’s work. When he sarcastically echoed the words of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in Mercian Hymns (1971), some readers decided he was signalling unpleasant political attitudes of his own. Interviewed by Robert Potts in 2002, he bemoaned the response to a stray comment he had made on 19th-century “Tory radicals”, the effect having been to associate him with more recent Tory regimes.
The reality of Hill’s political opinions was more complex. He was also more than capable of changing his mind. When Canaan appeared in 1996, it contained an elegy for the plotters against Hitler, wondering sternly if their “martyred resistance serves / to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht”. His swipes at Margaret Thatcher in the same volume appeared to align Hill with an older form of hierarchical conservatism. In the remarkable testamentary volume that is The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, Hill singles out those lines on the Maastricht treaty to publicly recant his earlier views. In passages that will surprise many, he celebrates the Easter Rising of 1916 and compares the laying of a wreath by the Queen in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance to Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto uprising memorial; he even eulogises the leader of the Labour party (“Corbyn must win”). There is scarcely one of the 271 sections in this book that does not assail the reader with the force of a vatic last judgment.
Hill’s title derives from an apocryphal Biblical text associated with the gnostic heresy. The gnostics held that all creation was evil, a position that lends an incendiary quality to their worldview. Hill, too, likes nothing better than dishing out thunderbolts. He takes as read that ours is a world of false prophets, in which “almost always the wrong people are admired, rewarded”. The book portrays a nation out of kilter: “big-bummed Britannia in her tracksuit”, an England of Brexit-voting “rotten boroughs and hobbits maudits”. The poet’s heroes are Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin, high Tories both, but present day Tories are “both rabble and oligarchy”.
Such is Hill’s seriousness that commentators often fall on his more frolicsome moments with unseemly haste. The element of “music-hall kvetch” remains strong here, but the line between quip and tragic harrumph is often blurred. The current state of British poetry is that of a “semi-derelict Pitcairn or abandoned South American whaling station”: not the most auspicious places to source a music hall audience, but suitably Lear-like spots for a “monologue shot through with frequent episodes of multi-voiced fugue”.
That monologue is also, implicitly, a dialogue with his younger self. The form of the poems is perhaps best described as prose “versets”, in a style close to that of Mercian Hymns. In another parallel with that collection, dense historical meditations are distilled from childhood vignettes – the “stately Victoriana” of Birmingham, where the young Hill attends pantomimes, a fantasy of his father flying overhead during the blitz. But this is a book that squarely confronts age and death, as when the poet wonders whether or not to draw a hospital curtain round his bed for privacy (he chooses not to), while the dying man in the opposite bed “will be gone in an hour or a little more”.
There is little to be gained from denying the demands involved in reading Hill, but the question of his difficulty has become an unwelcome distraction down the years. The appearance of “usufruct”, “fiduciary”, “anhedral” or “foison” should not represent too much of a challenge to readers within reach of a smartphone. Those baffled by the procession of eminent names should imagine they are reading a latter day Anglo-Saxon chronicle saga, and being treated to a roll call of the kings of Mercia, if that would help.
How, though, will posterity sift the riches of Hill’s late work? Not, I suspect, by rounding up best-loved extracts from all those gnomic late volumes, any more than Robert Browning is remembered for readers’ favourite bits of The Ring and the Book. Rather, I believe (with a heavy heart), he will continue to feature in anthologies for poems such as “September Song” and “In Memory of Jane Fraser”, while more hardcore fans pick over the late work as a kind of composite epic poem.
The comparison with Browning goes deep. The description of Tennyson’s In Memoriam as “an emotional scam drawn on the pieties of our social betters” is pointedly abrasive (Hill’s great debt to Tennyson notwithstanding), and the testiness may remind readers of the monk in Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (“Gr-r-r – there go, my heart’s abhorrence!”). In Hill as in Browning, the poles of sacred and secular, vision and squalor, run very close together. The Book of Baruch is a work of the sovereign imagination in a state of radical alienation, to put it in Hillian terms, and all the better for its soiling at the hands of a fallen and imperfect world. Or as Browning might say: “Plena gratia / Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r – you swine!”
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