It's a bit of a factitious "series" anyway (I've seen claims that
Canaan + TTOL + Speech! Speech! are a trilogy, then that TTOL +
Speech! Speech! + The Orchards of Syon are a trilogy, then Scenes from
Comus came out...it's a bit like The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
billing itself as a trilogy in five parts). I think he just keeps
knocking them out, and will probably carry on doing so until the
reaper catches up with him.
While the poems present themselves as outward and visible signs of an
inward and spiritual struggle with difficult matter, they are not
themselves "difficult" in that sense. "Impenetrable", yes; but other
people's minds *are* impenetrable and I think part of the point is to
remind the reader of that fact. I don't think it actually helps that
much to be a literary intellectual. Because Hill himself is a literary
intellectual, I suppose that literary intellectuals might share more
of his frame of reference, but even among literary intellectuals
people who've read Thomas Bradwardine's _De Causa Dei_, or even know
what it's about, are in somewhat of a minority.
There are at any one time various overlapping "consensus realities",
shared frames of reference which are useful for exchanging information
(or disinformation) and co-ordinating activity (or inactivity, as may
be). When we talk about poetry having "an audience", often we mean
something like market positioning: poetry that is pitched to a
particular discursive consensus, and especially poetry that reinforces
that consensus, tends to be found "penetrable" by consensus-users and
achieves "market penetration" as a result. This interpenetration
produces satisfying feelings of cathexis and mutual warmth, in the
absence of which the reading public tends to feel spurned or cheated
and goes off in search of the superior jollies that are to be had
elsewhere.
Being a modernist, Hill wants to renew the language of consensus, to
broaden the spectrum of information it is able to carry, purify it of
certain sorts of disinformation ("cant"), and perhaps encourage its
users to "alter their object and better their intent". The fact that
much of his poetry seems like indigestible foreign matter is presented
as evidence of the narrowness of our public faculties: Hill advances a
persona who in attempting to articulate what most nearly concerns him
finds himself driven back into an obsessional private code, because
the things he wants to say are not *sayable* in the common tongue.
The point I'm trying to make is that if one finds oneself unable to
grasp what is going on in the interior of this obsessional private
discourse, that does not mean that either oneself or the poem has
failed (on account of the insurmountable "difficulty" of the task).
Hill's poetry dramatizes the dissociation between private reason (and
passion) and public speech, and tries to reconnect and reconfigure
what has become disconnected and disfigured. It's not so much
something you understand, as something you watch him do.
Dominic
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 06:48:54 -0000, Douglas Clark
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- 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'.
>
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
