Collected Critical Writings.

Merriman, Emily Taylor

Collected Critical Writings. By Geoffrey Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-920847-0. Pp. x + 816. $49.95.

Selected Poems. By Geoffrey Hill. Yale: Yale University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-300-12156-8. Pp. 276. $35.00.

If you are allowed one work of literary criticism to be marooned with on a desert island, take Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings, painstakingly edited by Kenneth Haynes. Its more than 800 pages and impressive indexing (including a separate index of biblical passages) will keep you occupied for some time. In the solitary world of your island, away from the distractions of modernity, it will be easier to read academic prose like Hill's that not only incorporates an enormous breadth of reference but eschews the commonplace and deliberately challenges the flow of its own arguments so that the moment you think you have grasped the point, you realize that you've lost it again. Reading Hill, at least for this reviewer, reveals the reader's ignorance and the weaknesses in her thinking habits--revelations less embarrassing on an uninhabited isle. His prose is often graceful but rarely gracious and certainly not ingratiating. It will help if your desert island has access to the Internet (Hill's objections to the mind-vacuuming pace of cyber-scholarship notwithstanding), a well-stocked university library, and a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Sometimes spoken of as the greatest living English poet, sometimes vilified for what is considered to be his elitist obscurantism, Hill has continued to increase in critical significance as he continues to compose poetry, although there are those who place higher value on his early collections than on his work since the mid-1990s, when he became more prolific. Although known for the difficulty of his work, he is read not only in his native Great Britain but also in the United States, where he lived for nearly twenty years, and in France, where he is translated by Rene Gallet. Hill has recently won new awards, including the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for the Collected Critical Writings, and he will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award in December from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, which is hosting a roundtable on "Faith and Fable" in his poetry at the 2009 Modern Languages Association Convention. The editions of poetry and criticism under review here constitute noteworthy milestones in the publication of Hill's writing, but they are far from the last word. In some cases, works have not been included in these volumes because they are still being written.

Nonetheless, while it is only "Collected" and not "Complete," the substantial Critical Writings consists of five separate smaller collections, a total of thirty-four essays whose topics range from Shakespeare to Southwell to the Oxford English Dictionary to Rosenberg to Emerson to Tyndale to George and T. S. Eliot, and plenty more. The central topic is poetry, but ethics, theology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, and their mutual entanglements are not tangential but essential. The essays, quite a few of them based on lectures, are precise, illuminating, and challenging. Like drugs, they can act to alter the mind. Some of them even hint at momentary and qualified intimations of the numinous. Hill takes close reading to the microscopic level, and historicist reading to the telescopic. I recently assigned one of the earlier essays, "Redeeming the Time" (first published in 1972-73 in Agenda) from The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (1984) to graduate students without discussing it or providing reading questions in advance. One night I suddenly awoke to perceive my act of omission and composed an email with careful, encouraging, and ultimately unnecessary directions. Students read material that they find challenging all the time. One older student emailed me to say that he hadn't had such fun in years. The fun of Hill is like the agonizing anticipation of the first part of an old-fashioned rollercoaster: winching up the incline ("Up the Hill | Difficulty" to quote from Speech! Speech! [30]) as the ratchety mechanism struggles with and against gravity. Although the exhilarating, breath-taking downward swoop never quite materializes in the Hill rollercoaster, one has the sense that it is always just over the next rise, and often the track turns an abrupt, disorienting curve as the ride continues its eccentric ascent. The greatest value of Hill's critical writings, however, is in the light they cast on the development of his poetics and thereby what they teach us about how to read his poetry. Despite the enthusiasms of Hill aficionados, there are many readers--even sensitive and sympathetic ones with positions in the literary academy--who ask themselves: "What is he doing in these poems? How are we to read such things? And why should we bother?" There is much material in the Collected Critical Writings that will answer these questions.

In one example of a poetry-illuminating moment (chosen somewhat at random), Hill offers a description of "the fundamental dilemma of the poet's craft" from a Christian perspective: "it is simultaneously an imitation of the divine fiat and an act of enormous human self-will" (563). At first this sounds convincing and definitive. But does this pairing of apparent contrasts really describe a dilemma? It is an act of enormous human self-will to imitate the divine fiat, as "Genesis," Hill's very first poem in the Selected Poems, demonstrates: "Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God" (3). What matters most, though, is to notice how Hill here understands the poet as being consciously divided between submission to greater powers and the assertion of the power of the self. These opposing forces generate the drama that propels the production of the lyric. At the same time, both external and personal powers work at shaping that lyric production into language that, ideally, astonishes.

Unless your island does have that decent library, Hill's Selected Poems will be a more frustrating choice than the Collected Critical Writings, not because one must look up all his allusions in order to experience much of what the poems express and insist upon, but because one will not be able to read the selected sections from the longer poems in their original contexts. While this well-made selection will bring Hill to the attention of more readers--an outcome to be heartily wished for--it is an aesthetic pity to see several great and various sequences, including the book-length poems, The Triumph of Love (1998), Speech! Speech! (2000), and The Orchards of Syon (2002), printed in attenuated form. This is not how they are best read. Such excerpting defies Hill's own critical skill in registering--and poetic skill in deploying--the power of context to transform meanings.

Although the Selected Poems was first published by Penguin in the United Kingdom in 2006, the United States had to wait until 2009 for Yale's edition. The text is unchanged, but the American version is pleasantly larger and in hardback. The most immediately striking thing about it is the different cover: a close-up of Hill's bristly face--wrinkles, age spots and all. He is looking right at the camera in an expression that shifts, Rorschach-like, between reproof, compassion, and challenge. Perhaps this intimate and intimidating cover is a hilarious pun, parodying the Internet social phenomenon of self-presentation called "Facebook" Hill has long made public his objections to the commodification of the poet's personality, a phenomenon he observed in the later verse of Lowell and Berryman and noted in an essay review, "Lives of the Poets" published in 1984 in Essays in Criticism but not included in the Collected Critical Writings.

The effect of the cover picture is to render momentarily strange the human face and even the physical phenomenon of the book itself. Toward the end of the Critical Writings, Hill acknowledges his own critical bias "for the alien and alienating formal word-pattern before everything" (562). This is not a commitment to formalism, nor is it a celebration of the sense of rupture at the heart of modernist art. It describes a yearning for poetry that does not rely on the musically or linguistically familiar. The yearning is as much political and ethical as aesthetic. It is comparable to the Brechtian concept of the Verfremdungseffekt in that it demands that the reader become self-consciously critical. The ordinary state of things is so lamentable that not to try to wrest things, including words and audiences, out of the ordinary, is to be complicit in the causes for lamentation--hence Hill's preference for the disturbing effects of early Eliot over the later comforting tone. It is the case that repeated if not uninterrupted failure in such human endeavors is inevitable (Hill speaks of this in the traditional Christian terms of original sin), and yet, as his continued writing attests, the effort must be made.

It is as impossible to review adequately the contents of Hill's Selected Poems as it is the Collected Critical Writings. Spanning more than fifty years, the poems are drawn from eleven collections written by a poet who has gone through several phases of self-reconfiguring. He is still writing today, likely in a new mode and to some extent about other matters, so it is too early to draw definitive conclusions. It is challenging even to select an illustrative quotation or two from this selection or to summarize its concerns, although there is plenty that one can sink one's readerly teeth into: for example, a deeply attractive (or repellent) seriousness about the relationship between public and private life, an engagement with the dream and nightmare of history, an allusive and elusive vision of literary community across time, ecological epiphanies, romantic and sexual intrigue, religious struggle, and the aforementioned technical battles with and alongside language and ethics. There is also Hill's boisterous, satirical humor. It dramatizes how the "intrinsic value" (a phrase and a concept that Hill's later critical prose as well as his poems seek to ground and justify) of human and natural life is marred by the absurdity of human intrinsic self-interest. The poetry sometimes even performs this marring of itself; the ugliness of the poet's anger stresses the lyric to breaking point. This is the laughable, disastrous paradox of our existence; as the ego (that necessary force for human awareness and survival) seeps into everything, including a poet's perception of his own genius, or the soul's perception of its own grace, it irremediably (barring the possibility of divine intervention) spoils our humanity:

 still to be at the last
 ourselves and masters of all
 humility--

The lines quoted above, which conclude the poem "De Anima" from Canaan (Selected Poems 142), exemplify Hill's skilful way with irony; the lines hold out then break and dissolve the promise of final, spiritual victory over even the self's desire for such victory. As Sir Philip Sidney says in The Defence of Poesy (1595) regarding the power of artistic (re)creation: "our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" a sentence that informs Hill's consideration of poetics, J. L. Austin, and Ezra Pound in "Our Word is our Bond" which concludes The Lords of Limit, the first section of the Collected Critical Writings. The penultimate section, "Inventions of Value" continues to wrestle with similar questions about what a poem can do. It omits a pertinent essay that Hill wrote on the work of Welsh clergyman R. S. Thomas (included in Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas [2003]). "R.S. Thomas's Welsh Pastoral" declares, "Every good poem--my earlier caveat notwithstanding--is in its own way a statement of value." Yet he clarifies that this is not the same thing as "a concern for values." With reference to Thomas's own prose and in "deference" to his vocation, Hill goes on to declare, "if ... we say the great questions of life are Christian questions, then we must add that there is no answer to these that can be truthfully secured in poetry" (54). Although critical labels have limitations, it may be useful to think of Hill as a postmodernist modernist poet, still seeking a ground of certainty in the shifting maze that relativistic modern scientific and philosophical understandings have generated.

At times Hill stands on such a ground in Christianity. One of his most ardent readers is the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; but in poetry at least, if we are to take Hill's word for it, such a ground cannot be viewed as "truthfully secured" Another possible such ground lies in attending, in defiance of solipsism, to that which exists beyond one's conscious self. Both Hill's prose and his poetry demonstrate and teach by example a profound respect for the nature of the other, including the otherness of language and otherness within the psyche. The last poem in Selected Poems is "Broken Hierarchies" which hovers between celebration and mourning. It ends, following a description of Appalachian bluegrass:

 a man's low voice that looms out of the drone:
 the humming bird that is not
 of these climes; and the great

 wanderers like the albatross;
 the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
 down on our alien shore. (276)

Hill's poems, especially some of the later ones, can be criticized for being "too much moved by hate," as the poet's speaker says himself in section LXXV of The Triumph of Love (a section not included in the Selected Poems). There is truth in this, but they are moved also by a passion for justice, an awareness of the dangers of that passion, a partial deflation of those dangers through humor, and by a wary, meticulous love.

Emily Taylor Merriman

San Francisco State University