> What I have to say in answer to this is probably predictable: it's a matter
> of half-full / half-empty. Hill's model of "incoherence," the "grunts and
> shrieks of history," is HIS model, HIS incoherence. It's quite difference
> from the "noise of history" Eliot lets into the Waste Land or Pound into
> Mauberley or Berryman into the Dream Songs or Lowell into Notebook, or
> whatever you or I might count as such "noise" and let into poems *we wrote.
> Hill's "noise" always either makes the reader more sympathetic to the poem's
> conservative / Christian-polity nostalgia, or criticizes the latter (I'm
> thinking especially of The Triumph of Love) - but only in limited,
> controlled doses. You're exactly right: Hill isn't a postmodernist.
> "Keeping the line in question" means "keeping the (ideological and formal)
> line while appearing to question it." Or, more generously, "keeping the
> line however much it is subjected to dialectical attack."
Well, that in a sense is just where the vexation lies: what the early
Hill seems to lie awake worrying about is precisely the tendency of
the poem, as context and container, to serve just this neutralising
function, absorbing the toxins that are introduced to it in measured
doses. At the same time, he just can't let go of the idea of artistic
coherence as a form of "atonement". So you get this vociferous
dialectic that's deeply committed to not resolving itself either way
(the choice being understood to be between extremes of solipsism and
madness). Later Hill shucks off this particular neurosis in favour of
a kind of staged polyphony, where instead of a single speaking "I"
managing interjections from "outside" you have a number of voices (or
tones of voice) cutting across each other. There is still, obviously,
the background figure of "the poet" involved in voicing and shaping
this polyphony. But "Speech! Speech!", for example, gives way to
genuine incoherence at times (while demonstrating very tight
traditional lyrical control at others) - its most interesting moments
for me are those where the boundary between the two becomes
indiscernible.
Dominic
|