Readers who don't agree on much else agree that Geoffrey Hill's poetry matters: Harold Bloom, Donald Hall and George Steiner have all dubbed him a major poet of his generation, even the best English poet alive. Hill's books are complex, full of intricate aural patterns, alert to big questions about belief and history. His books also differ greatly from one another: Mercian Hymns (1971) juxtaposed Hill's own Worcestershire childhood with the deeds of an Anglo-Saxon warrior-king, while The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983) wove anguished meditations around a French poet who perished in World War I. Hill's new book-length poem, The Orchards of Syon (Counterpoint), takes in writers and creators from Beethoven to D.H. Lawrence to the medieval thinker Thomas Bradwardine, setting them like gems into his own musings and exploring a pastoral England Hill at once remembers and remakes.
Until Speech! Speech! (2000), Hill's work appeared in the U.S. from Houghton Mifflin. Why did Hill move? "I came to be with Counterpoint," he says, "because my very good editor at Houghton Mifflin, Chris Carduff, left and went to Counterpoint, and I know a good editor when I see one." Carduff knows "exactly how poetry works and why poetry is not just prose sliced up into short lines." He has also remained "enormously generous in allowing me to, while the thing is being set up, say, 'Look, I've changed my mind about this section.' "
Hill spent 30 years in English academia, at Oxford, Leeds and Cambridge. His debut, For the Unfallen (1959), earned international admiration; he also enjoyed support closer to home, not least from the journal Poetry & Audience, begun at Leeds in 1954. Leeds also became, Hill continues, "the very first British university to appoint creative writing fellows." No poet-in-residence himself, Hill taught traditional academic subjects; he continues to do so at Boston University, where he has been a professor of literature and religion since 1988.
Hill explains that his recent books make "a tetralogy," beginning with the shorter poems of Canaan (1997). "Essentially, I was working on Canaan from 1985 to about 1995. The other three books came remarkably quickly. But I do see The Triumph of Love, which was the next book, as very much taking up certain images, certain ideas, which I was working on in the latter stages of Canaan." Critics have often focused on those ideas, considering Hill as a critic of mass culture or an opponent of Tony Blair's New Britain. Hill objects to such a reading: "It's as if they're saying, 'Hill is writing in code, and it is our duty to translate his code into simple everyday English, or American English.' I don't really see it like that." Instead, Hill suggests, what matters is always language: "unless you have a kind of electrical energy sparking between the words and phrases, and between the phrases and the rhythms, of a poem, all the talk in the world about thematic significance is not going to help one jot."
Close attention to language has become, for Hill, a sort of moral imperative. He explains that Speech! Speech! asks "how to make speech meaningful when the world has done all it can to debauch and trivialize it. I'm one of these old-fashioned Original Sin people," he adds. "I am almost bound not to believe that any particular age in human society was a golden age, when everything was right and everything was good." Nevertheless, in recent decades, Hill says, "the tempo of the degradation, the intensity of the debauch, have certainly increased." Hill's new volume turns from denunciation to pastoral vision: "If joy/ is still in waiting," one segment concludes, "then let it be called." Where Speech! Speech! "is largely though not wholly a pessimistic vision, The Orchards of Syon is, if not an optimistic work, at least a meliorist work; it's a work which does see that mutual forgiveness and understanding and beauty are things which survive."
Each of Hill's books explores a new formal challenge. Earlier on, Hill wrote many sorts of sonnets. The Orchards of Syon uses unrhymed units modeled on the Italian canzone. Hill says his line there "tries to retain and develop some of the traditional fullness and resonance that is associated with the blank verse line. In each case the sound of the thing, the sound of the line, is an inextricable part of the general, so to speak, viewpoint of the work."
Though his poems remain full of British geography, Hill says he prefers U.S. literary culture. British poetry involves "a London-based oligarchy," despite the hard work of publishers based elsewhere (e.g., Carcanet in Manchester, Bloodaxe in Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Here, by contrast, "Anything goes, and anything can happen.... The very best review of Speech! Speech! that I got, and one of the very best reviews I've ever had, was in an online program called popmatters [www.popmatters.com] by a man called Andy Fogle... And it was wonderfully sympathetic—I mean technically sympathetic, I don't mean falling over itself to be gentle and kind, I mean as one would talk about the sympathetic strings on an instrument vibrating." Fogle's piece "ended—and I relish the accolade— 'This is one Anglo-white-male-old-fart who holds his own, from whom both the edges and mainstream can take a cue.' I think that's wonderful. This could not possibly have happened in Britain. Springing up from somewhere, some entirely unknown quarter, one gets this vivid and vital response. I find it enormously encouraging."
