CRITICISM: Collected Critical Writings By Geoffrey Hill. Edited by Kenneth Haynes. Oxford University Press, 816pp. £25A fascinating portrait of the intellectual life and civic concerns of one of England's leading poets, which has the first World War as its key
IN HIS POEM Hangover Square, Derek Mahon declares:
"In the known future real books will be rarities in techno-culture, a forest of intertextuality like this, each one a rare book and what few we have written for prize-money and not for love".
If this is what the future holds, so be it. As for the past, poet and scholar Geoffrey Hill, in this monumental volume of his critical writings, takes the reader on a soaring trip through the greats of classical and modern English literature, with the foundation stones of European religious and literary culture formidably present throughout. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, the martyred Robert Southwell rub shoulders with George Eliot, Hopkins, Coleridge, the watchful figure of TS Eliot is never too far away, alongside the American Kenyon Critics (Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Matthiessen), and the first World War poets, such as Ivor Gurney, Charles Sorley and Isaac Rosenberg. All assemble in the brilliant dance of Hill's imaginative invention of an England and "Englishness" that seems, a little like the recurring biblical quotations and references, almost foreign to contemporary time and its orthodoxies.
For in many ways what strikes the reader most forcibly about this fascinating portrait of the intellectual life and civic concerns of one of England's leading poets is the sheer weight of Hill's commitment to the life of the imagination and the meaning of literary art.
Constantly, he returns the focus of his critical attention to the foibles of the present, and in often quite unexpected ways, links the achievement of, say, Robert Southwell with the creative mind of Antonin Artaud. Iris Murdoch's brilliant introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre sets up Hill's reading of several poets and philosophers and their ability to "redeem the time", as Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry emerges as "dogged resistance".
DECADENCE IS THE enemy and what makes Collected Critical Writings such a surprise is that, even though the writing can become arch and obsessive in parts - there are several passages which simply enter Alice in Wonderland-like mazes of quotation and the reader is left wondering what all the fuss is about - the moral dignity and scholarly authority Hill brings to his subjects is quite simply breath-taking at times, particularly when he is at his most direct and allows his own English language to do the work for him.
The "perspective requires", he remarks about the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Ben Jonson, "utterance of deliberate cliché, but cliché rinsed and restored to function as responsible speech". The moral weight ("responsible") is all in that single word "rinsed" which carries inside itself a vernacular history of its own - familial, industrial, cultural.
And it's this that fascinates about Hill's critical writing, for throughout this world-view there are the ghosts of previous English worlds, and words, and the integrity of the language, and history, out of which the great writers that he focuses upon have emerged since the beginning of an English literature; this is the bedrock of his accumulated study. Hill is adamant about "literary in the best sense of the term", of "products of the creative imaginative" and of how these fit into a moral and civic order within which people, ordinary people, respond as informed readers, as citizens and as writers. Collected Critical Writings is all about such fundamental matters alongside the ins and outs of individual inflections in this poet's work or in that dramatic scene or setting.
THE KEY TO this study is in that all-defining moment in the history of England (and of course, Europe) - the Great War. In the midst of the carnage the poetic voice held sway to such an extent that for subsequent generations the political and/or military priorities of the time did not obscure what happened, and the human cost.
In his critical tribute to Isaac Rosenberg, the young London poet and painter of Jewish émigré background, Hill has fashioned a portrait for our times as much as of one drawn from a somewhat marginalised poet who died almost 100 years ago. It is a magnificent piece of writing that marries historical understanding and humane sensitivity with pitch-perfect critical judgment.
"In consideration of British and American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century," Hill writes, "the quotidian has been, with significant exceptions, overvalued as the authenticating factor in the work of the imagination. The poem itself, assessed in this way, becomes the author's promise to pay on demand, to provide real and substantial evidence of a suffering life for which the poem itself is merely a kind of tic-tac or flyer."
No more than in his poetry, (and in the last decade we have had a prolific outpouring from Hill, returned to England from living and working for almost 20 years in the United States) the killing fields are never too far away as a moral context, not to browbeat the poetic effort but as a kind of vigilant omniscient shadow cast over the frailties and tenacity of the human voice.
Running as a subtext through this literary study history and its "lessons" are scored in the social and cultural realities of the here and now.
The stern practitioner and the knowledgeable teacher merge in the powerful vision of a substantial book that every alert and engaged reader will unquestionably want to challenge, revise, revisit and review. But the good news is Geoffrey Hill raises these potent issues in the very grounds of poetry itself and in so doing raises the standard in our "techno-culture".
Gerald Dawe's new poetry collection, Points West, will be published in July by Gallery Press. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin