Geoffrey Hill: tributes to 'a poet of immense gifts'
Carol Ann Duffy, poet laureate
Geoffrey Hill was, in poetry, a saint and a warrior who never gave an inch in his crusade to reach poetic truth. In four words - “God is distant, difficult” – he could suddenly illuminate, like lightning over a landscape.
Christopher Ricks, critic and scholar
There was no living poet whose latest work I more wished for and stood in need of at once, on the day of publication, above all for its immediacy. Long ago, I called him “a poet at once urgent and timeless”. Yesterday (30 June 2016), I collected the five copies that I had ordered of his mint-new Peer Gynt, complementing his superb Brand. He always maintained what he had maintained: that our word is our bond. What is it to stand by what you have done and been and said? For my manifestly smaller part, I stand by my convictions, voiced over the course of 50 years, that his poems “matter increasingly, they accrue”. And that “Hill is his own man, yet his poems bear witness to TS Eliot’s high sense of tradition: ‘The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) among them’”. In 1968, King Log was the really new. And still is. But then so was all that Geoffrey Hill created on poetry’s behalf, on his own dear behalf, and on ours.
Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 by Geoffrey Hill – review
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Andrew Motion, former poet laureate
Geoffrey Hill was one of the greatest English language poets of the last 70-odd years, and time may well prove him the greatest of all. England stands at the centre of his work, but the brilliance and ambition with which he tackles themes of historical process, religion, politics and statehood (as well as the personal past), and the way his work combines subtlety with beauty, mean that from a local base he is able to address and include the world. From the comparatively clear earlier poems, all the way through to their later and more difficult counterparts, he has been exemplary: a poet of immense gifts, originality and authenticity.
Hermione Lee, critic and biographer
Long ago, in the mid-1980s, I did a memorable interview with him about his poem on Charles Peguy, where he was, as ever, challenging, forensic, scrupulous and stringent about language, powerful, unforgiving about easy explanations – and also rueful, humorous and funny. I greatly admire in particular the earlier work, the tenderness of the love poems, the fierce attention to history, the intensity of the language.
In his lectures, he gave no quarter: he brought a rigorous dedication to the best use of language, a strong and passionate belief in what great poetry is, and a stringent, compelling analysis of how it works, combined with a comical, anarchic, self-dramatising presentation of himself as part sage, part anarchist, part bard, part wit – a combination of King Lear and Lear’s Fool.
[His students were] … transfixed … It was as if one of the legendary poets of the past had walked into the room, complete with white beard, stick, dark clothes, glamorous waistcoats, fierce burning eyes, and deep resonant voice. This was how a poet of the old school ought to look. He presented no handouts, no PowerPoint, no aids to concentration: he just read and spoke with passion, fervour, often rage and scorn, about what poetry means, and is for, and does at its greatest. There was plenty to argue with and disagree with. But it was a mighty, bardic performance and an unforgettable way of speaking. His readings of poems by the poets in his pantheon, in particular, were moving and generous.
Adam Foulds, poet and novelist
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Geoffrey Hill’s poetry early. As a teenager I bought the old Penguin edition of the Collected Poems. Between its front cover image of Gaugin’s painting of Jacob strenuously wrestling the angel and a back cover thickly set with praise from the likes of George Steiner and a small inset photograph of the man himself scowling beneath a stark and supremely self-confident comb-over, this book contained all of Hill’s first four astonishing volumes. I had been warned of Hill’s difficulty, the hard work needed to make sense of the poems, but it took no effort to appreciate immediately the precise sensuousness of his language and intellect:
I leaned to the lamp; the pallid moths
Clipped its glass, made an autumnal sound.
Words clawed my mind as though they had smelt
Revelation’s flesh.
From such lines it was clear that Hill was, in Auden’s phrase, one of those poets by whom the language lives. The work is indeed erudite and allusive. Hill is a poet who matches TS Eliot’s ideal of the individual talent taking his place within the tradition, rearranging it, revivifying it, entering its complex conversations. While some are put off by Hill’s references to other works and times, feeling a chilly, admonitory blast from an impatient scholarly superego, it always seemed generous to me, an invitation into the treasure houses of European literary culture. One’s ignorance lasts only as long as one allows it to and the rewards for effort are great cultural riches. The allusions are necessary to a poet whose work has so much to do with the exercise of the historical imagination in a poetry that wishes to charge every word with meaning. Take this line from one of three poems entitled A Short History Of British India, a sub-sequence within the longer sequence An Apology For The Revival Of Christian Architecture in England.
With indifferent aim
unleash the rutting cannon at the walls
of forts and palaces
Notice how ‘indifferent aim’ implies both the military activity that doesn’t care about the number or type of casualties and the lack of any long term “aim” or plan, and notice too how brilliantly “rutting” evokes the back and forth movement of cannons firing between machicolations, satirises the phallic pomp of empire, indicts its rape of other nations, and brings to mind the idea of getting stuck in a rut. All achieved so economically, so memorably. This is great poetry that combines sensuality, precision and historical insight.
Hill’s words have clawed my mind for the last twenty-five years. Our loss in his death is grievous and deeply sad in what are already sad times but he leaves behind him a body of work of unparalleled integrity, beauty and depth that will be read for centuries to come.
Jacqueline Norton, Hill’s editor at OUP
We’re very saddened by the news of Geoffrey Hill’s death, but also grateful to have worked with him and extremely proud to have published his Collected Critical Writings in 2008 and Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 in 2013. Both volumes gather a lifetime of brilliant work – much of it recent - and show what a very great poet and critic Geoffrey is. The acclaim poured in for these books. The critical writings won the Truman Capote prize in 2009 and reviewers of Broken Hierarchies recognised the depth of Geoffrey’s poetic genius. His fierce intelligence will be much missed, as will his moral seriousness.