----- Original Message -----
From: "Eileen Abrahams" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 12:46 AM
Subject: Re: Geoffrey Hill's Comus
> Douglas,
> I've just read Hill's Comus for the first time, and of course, I'll need
> to
> read it many times over to understand it in the way I want to understand
> it
> (its dense allusions, its entangled voices, its Welsh, etc.), but there
> are
> also passages of astounding lyrical beauty and translucent wit. I hardly
> think that Hill's poetry ever only yields a moments' thrill. Would you
> care
> to clarify?
> Best,
> Eileen
>
It is a bit like Michael Hofmann's poem in today's Times Literary
Supplement. The language is superb but a poor ignorant person like me is
left bereft of the meaning. His only penetrable poems have been the lesser
poems re his father. I used to like the feel of his language but have
stopped buying his books.
A similar feeling has come over me e Geoffrey Hill. I thought Funeral Music
a great piece of work in the language when I came upon it nearly forty years
ago. And Mercian Hymns was more penetrable still with the distinctive
language. Since then he has been patchy and often more prosey presumably
from the lessons he learnt translating Ibsen. I think the last book where I
think the mix of penetrability and language occured was in Canaan. I bought
the first two of the new series of books but didnt buy the third. It is many
years since I read Comus and I doubt if a reading would help me with Hill's
new poem. But from the ten minutes I spent with it yesterday afternoon it
seems a triumphal return in the sense of quality of language. But as to
meaning I couldnt make head or tale of it and not being a literary
intellectual I am not capable of the understanding of the work.
So I have to relegate Hill's and Hofmann's books to the level of
'entertainment' which is much in vogue in poetry these days. Where you
salivate over the words as you read them but ten minutes after you have
finished the book the experience has vanished from memory because the
meaning is impenetrable for you. Hofmann and Hill are serious poets with
something to say and I find it a tragedy for me that I am too thick to treat
them as anything but 'entertainment'. I hope that explains my 'moment's
thrill'.
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