Donald Wesling was the first person to tell that I had to read Geoffrey Hill some twenty years ago. I finally got around to it recently with Speech! Speech! a series of 120 12-line poems, one for each of the 120 days of Sodom. It’s one of those books that you – or at least I – want to like. 

At one level, this book seeks a certain density of language, far more taut & compact than most poets operating within the conservative tradition of the British Isles. In that sense, it’s closest kin among Hill’s peers might be Paul Muldoon, like Hill a full-time teacher in the U.S. Still, Hill’s condensare is quite a bit looser than many folks on this side of the pond, from Zukofsky to Bök. Rather, Speech! Speech! gestures at density, stuffing the text with CAPITALS, foreign languages, néédless accents, feigned dialect & odd slices of vertical punctuation (“|”)  to arrive at a sort of huff-&-puff dramatic monolog, with an eye to Berryman & an ear towards Hopkins:

Fine figure of a man, say it. Try

thís for size. Say it | why are we waiting?

Get stuck in. Hurdy-gurdy the starter

handle to make backfire. Call monthlies

double-strength stale fleurs du mal. Too close

for comfort | say it, Herr Präsident, weep

lubricant and brimstone, wipe yo’ smile.

COMPETITIVE DEVALUATION – a great find

wasted on pleasantries of intermission.

Say it: licence to silence: say it: me

Tarzan, you | diva of multiple choice,

rode proud on oúr arousal-cárrousel.

There is not one single device here that wasn’t used in, say, The Cantos, so the question here cannot be one of breaking new ground. Content-wise, any Poetry Project workshop student who couldn’t comment more succinctly on Mr. Clinton’s personal foibles would stand ashamed – at twelve lines, Hill’s text is seriously bloated. Underneath its gaudy exterior, individual lines range between nine & twelve syllables, generally yielding (if you buy all those accents) ye olde five-foot meter, but at least not with tub-thumping regularity in feet. Hill’s dramatic mode throughout is closer to Mauberly than to the later Pound. It seems patently evident that this work, both in this section & throughout the volume, wants to appear far more Modern than Hill himself is willing to go. With an apocalyptic vision of life right out of The Waste Land, Speech! Speech! is Modern with a capital M. Which is to say that it is not at all contemporary.

The inherent conflict in a conservative poet trying to write as a Modern led to some great results in Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Seven plus decades later, it has the feel of an historic re-enactment, the way modernism might be carried out by something like Civil War buffs on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not unlike the Bloomsday readings of Ulysses that have become an annual literary sport in several cities . . . except that Joyce is the real deal, while Speech! Speech! is merely aggressively faux.

Still, there is both an ear & a wit here. The last three lines are lovely even with the Christmas-tree ornamentation of accent & punctuation. And there are moments in the first nine lines where the over-the-top stylistics are sort of fun. If Hill could just be read without the critical trappings that have been appended to this minor art, he might be quite enjoyable. That, alas, is an insurmountable if . . . .

Hill himself doesn’t seem so full of pretense. After all, his models here are decidedly minor. Hill would be far better served by his advocates if they would not go about declaring him “indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world” (Peter Levi), “The strongest British poet now alive” (Harold Bloom), “the best English poet of the twentieth century” (Donald Hall)  or “the finest British poet of our time” (John Hollander). Hall, at least, should know better.

What pathology inscribes such hubris? Do these critics think that by making such sweepingly ridiculous claims that they can abolish the actual history of British literature over the past 100 years, let alone that of the rest of the English speaking world,? Are they actually ignorant of the work of Basil Bunting, Jeremy Prynne, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, Ian Hamilton Finlay or Hugh MacDiarmid? They’ve never heard of Samuel Beckett or William Butler Yeats? Against the drab backdrop of the conservative tradition in British literature, the likes of Larkin & Hughes, Hill can be said to shine, unquestionably, although I think you could make a good argument that Auden & Thom Gunn offer considerably more in the way of substance. But that tradition doesn’t represent even one third of British literature and the “see no contemporary / hear no contemporary / speak no contemporary” monkeys of canonic Establishmentarianism not only commit critical malpractice when they pretend otherwise, they also do serious damage to the very person whose poetry they claim to support. Poor Geoffrey Hill!