In Praise of Charles Williams

Sir Geoffrey Hill's review of Grevel Lindop's study of Williams is critical of the subtitle of the book, yet gives Lindop credit for writing a full biography, taking into account the material conditions of Williams's childhood and adulthood.

Along the way, reading this review one learns of the beneficial influence of editor Anne Ridler on "Williams's later poetry." For Hill, the "spiritual shocker" novels by Williams are still worth the read. And he particularly recommends Williams's critical works, The English Poetic Mind (1932) and Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (1933).

Williams is "powerful and weird in essential ways." Find out more:

Geoffrey Hill, "Charles Williams: mightier and darker" TLS (23 March 2016).

True Friendship

Something to look forward to: Christopher Ricks is due to publish True Frienship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound with Yale University Press in February 2010.

Blue Rose

William Logan's review of A Village Life by Louise Glück in the New York Times (August 27, 2009) contains the following remark:

"Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday's truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer."

Peter McDonald's plea for the Oxford Professor of Poetry

In an article published in this week's TLS, Peter McDonald suggests:  

"...it is worth thinking of the Oxford Chair as a position of responsibility: and above all as Oxford's particular responsibility to literature and the future.  Recent events have made it essential for the University to prove that it is equal to its responsibilities, and not at the mercy of every contemporary wind that blows."

He argues that Geoffrey Hill would be well suited to the position.

Links:

Peter McDonald, "The Oxford Poetry Professor controversy - a suggestion," Times Literary Supplement (June 3, 2009).

About the controversy over the elections for the Oxford Professor of Poetry, held in May (May 26, 2009).

Honoring René Gallet

A Festschrift in honor of Hill's long-time translator René Gallet has been published in La Revue LISA/LISA e-journal.  Geoffrey Hill contributed new poetry, "Seven Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres."  The issue also features five critical articles about Hill's poetry, as well as numerous studies of Hopkins.  René Gallet's critical writings on Graham Greene as well as  "Dracula entre Darwin et Bunyan," and "Hopkins à l'époque de Maxwell" make this a memorable issue of the periodical, edited by Renée Dickason.

Links:

Geoffrey Hill, "Seven Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres," (2009).

Table of Contents, LISA e-journal 7:3 (2009).

A.N. Wilson on the Archbishop

This week's Times Literary Supplement (December 10, 2008) features A.N. Wilson's review of Rupert Shortt's The biography of the Archbishop (Hodder and Stoughton, 2008).  For Wilson, Rowan Williams "has initiated an intelligent discussion about the nature of religion, such as we have not heard since William Temple was Archbishop."  And that, of course, includes poetry.

Contributing to the celebration of Milton's 400th Birthday

Today is the actual anniversary of the day Milton was born, and Geoffrey Hill has been active in the events of the Milton Quatercentenary.  Geoffrey Hill's Lady Margaret Lecture, "Milton as Muse," (Christ's College Cambridge, October 29, 2008) is available on a podcast.  He insists that Milton influenced Wordsworth and that "Milton's major muse was the city."

Links

"John Milton 400th Anniversary Celebrations, The Lady Margaret Lectures 2008" Christ's College, Cambridge (2008).

"John Milton 400: Milton Quatercentenary," Cambridge (2008).

"John Milton, A Symposium to Commemorate the Quatercentenary of his Birth," British Academy (December 6, 2008).

Did Péguy kill Jaurès?

"Did Péguy kill Jaurès?  Did he incite / the assassin?" asked Hill's poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983).  In France, the questioning continues.

Pierre Assouline, "Darcos a-t-il édulcoré Péguy?" Le Monde, blog (November 28, 2008).

Hédi Kaddour, "Quand M. Darcos écrit l'Histoire," Po&sie (November 2008).

A one-day conference about Péguy and the Press, sponsored by the association Amitié Charles Péguy, will take place December 7, Maison Nicolas Barré, 75006 Paris.

Geoffrey Hill's interview with Anne Mounic in English

As Carole Birkan-Berz noted on "The Geoffrey Hill Exchange" page, Sylvia Paul has translated Anne Mounic's interview with Geoffrey Hill into English for The Geoffrey Hill Study Centre, accompanied by a photo of the "Moulin Mystique" sculpture from Vézelay.

Geoffrey Hill in conversation with Anne Mounic

Religious poetry in English and in French is the uniting feature of Temporel #6 (October 2008).  Geoffrey Hill's poems in French translation by René Gallet, Jacques Darras, Patrick Hersant and Anne Mounic appear along with poetry by Michael Edwards,  as well as Anne Mounic's interview with Geoffrey Hill and a review of René Gallet's translation of The Triumph of Love.

    One sentence from the interview, drawn out of a hat, as it were:  "Le véritable poète est complètement isolé."  For some reason, the paragraph where that sentence appears reminds me of the first stanza of Donald Hall's poem "To a Waterfowl."

    Longtime readers of Hill will find this issue essential reading.  One example: Hill reveals that "September Song" is indeed an elegy for a deported girl.  While at an exhibit of children's artwork from Theresienstadt, he viewed a painting with dates of birth that closely matched his own. 

Rowan Williams "speaks knowledgeably...about Geoffrey Hill"

Even though Williams does not speak much about Hill in this article, you may wish to read it:

A.N. Wilson, "Where Rowan Williams meets Dostoevsky," Telegraph (September 27, 2008).

Missing the puns

In Kirsch's chapter on Geoffrey Hill in The Modern Element: essays on Contemporary Poetry (2008), Langdon Hammer's point about puns (see below) is indeed clearly demonstrated.  Kirsch's reading of "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings" refrains from commenting on a key repetition of the poem, "They lie; they lie" which underscores the intended pun.  Kirsch's interpretation seems deliberately first-degree, and avoids addressing the political commitment of the poem, probably because he does not find it to his liking.

"Obsessed with the difficulty of honest poetic speech"

That is Adam Kirsch describing Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 in his review of Without Title (New York Sun, March 28, 2007).  "The best reason to read Mr. Hill is . . . the self-forgetting that occurs when he writes about nature and landscape, love and death."

Hammering Kirsch

Langdon Hammer reviewed Adam Kirsch's The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (Norton, 2008) and his voume of poetry Invasions (2008) in the New York Times (August 29, 2008) republished in the International Herald Tribune (September 4, 2008).

Hammer suggests that Kirsch's view of the pun is what  "explains his impatience with Geoffrey Hill, James Merrill and Jorie Graham..."

Carol Rumens on "Tristia: 1891-1938"

Carol Rumens chose "Tristia:1891-1938" as poem of the week in the Guardian (August 4, 2008). Sagely she writes, "I would argue that any amount of difficulty is justified in a poem: so too is any amount of simplicity, provided, in both cases, the poet is doing something sufficiently interesting and memorable with language."

Celebrating Milton

This year, for the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth (Milton Quatercentenary), Hill has an occasion to further reveal his Milton connection. He read poems by Milton and also from his own work at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (April 4, 2008). He will speak on "Milton as Muse" in the Lady Margaret Lecture Series (October 29, 2008), followed by Christopher Ricks, "Milton and 'the best criticism of any work'" on November 26. (Earlier lectures from the same series by Quentin Skinner, Colin Burrow, and Sharon Achinstein are already available on-line as podcasts.) On December 6, he will be reading from his poetry during a day-long Symposium devoted to Milton at the British Academy.

Link:

http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/lectures.htm

Hill's conference at the Collège de France on-line (MP3)

Geoffrey Hill was invited by Michael Edwards to speak at the Collège de France (March 18, 2008), and the conference has been posted on-line in MP3 format (July 2008).

Ira Lightman on Geoffrey Hill and Jeffrey Wainwright

In a review of Jeffrey Wainwright's Acceptable Words (2005), Ira Lightman talks about Wordsworth, Prynne, and Silliman, while singing  "I'm not in love, and don't forget it." Read it yourself in Stride Magazine (2008).

R.W. & G.H.

Le Monde on August 5th ran two articles concerning the end of the Lambeth conference that emphasized the unresolved tensions within Anglicanism. My thoughts went to Rowan Williams who admirably conversed with Geoffrey Hill at the opening of “Geoffrey Hill & His Contexts” at Keble (July 2, 2008). What follows are excerpts from notes taken at the conference and may (unintentionally) misrepresent the speakers. I do hope that a complete transcript will become available soon.

RW: began by quoting Ruskin, “Everything costs its own cost and one of the best virtues is a just desire to pay it.”

GH: spoke of his new article in the Warwick Review, concerning the just state, “…we live in plutocratic anarchy,” destroying the sense of intrinsic value.*

RW: “Poetry embodies the labor of seeking…” he said and mentioned two ways a poem shows laboriousness, through the need expressed and the muscles (heroism) of fixing the reader on complexity.

GH: “I see difficulties on the way leading to semantic epiphany . . .” T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets mumble and proclaim difficulties in a low-grade way. Those “pensées” don’t engage with real struggle like the lesser-known Kierkegaardian poems that Eberhart wrote.

RW: quoted Bradley, “the judgment to contain the condition of the judgment . . .”

GH: Bradley’s “somehow” signals the epiphanic final moment of a poem. John Berryman, quoting R.P. Blackmur in a poem suggests that the art of poetry is amply distinguished from verse by its fresh idiom, language twisted and posed such that a poem “adds to the stock of available reality.” Poems change the course of the world by extending reality. “A great poem is an annunciation or epiphany.”

RW: Hopkins?

GH: The poem is a monumental object that contains bidding. “Difficulty” is the greatest safeguard democracy can have.

RW: What about time, the time to read and understand and make criticism?

GH: Velocity is increasing exponentially and will destroy memory. Computer technology is a velocity thing: a plethora of information speedily applied will destroy criticism.


*See: Geoffrey Hill, “Civil Polity and the Confessing State,” The Warwick Review 2:2 (June 2008)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickreview/jun2008

Donald Hall & Geoffrey Hill

"I cannot live without Geoffrey Hill," said Hall when interviewed by B. Renner (December 1996-January 1997), posted on elimae:

http://www.elimae.com/interviews/hall.html