Among poets writing in English during the last forty years, Geoffrey Hilln was sometimes named the greatest one alive, but he was alwaysn named the most difficult one to read. He had come to live and teach inn America in the 1980s, along with a brilliant group which included Pauln Muldoon at Princeton (since 1987), Seamus Heaney at Harvard (1985–2006),n and Derek Walcott at Boston University (1981–2007). These were famous poetsn who had been drawn from the United Kingdom and its old territories to then riches of the American universities, yet they were never American poets.n They lived in a kind of half-exile in which they were weighted down withn laurels and prizes regularly given by literary committees and societiesn while being mostly ignored or neglected by their students—as Walcottn admitted to me in conversation one day.
n One did not have to guess at Hill’s isolation. He was the least famous ofn that brilliant set of foreign poets, and the least approachable, too. In recall seeing him for the first time in 2001 in the cramped quarters of hisn office at Boston University, reading something intently and quite alone.n His door was open for office hours, but he seemed somewhat startled to ben interrupted. I gathered from his demeanor that he was not often consultedn in this way. There was a serious tribe of poets and critics who admiredn him from afar, but how many had actually met the man? Very few. The sensen I got from reading and hearing things about him was that Hill kept himselfn apart. Not for him the American circuit of parties and book signings. Hendidn’t write for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or any of the elite literary magazines in the U.S.n
n He was gruff when I entered, almost forbidding, and that great bald headn and those unblinking eyes stared at everything with unusual intensity, andn perhaps even a bit of dismissive judgment. But once he spoke, the demeanorn softened, and one noticed kindness was lurking in his words and notn contempt. I introduced myself and then asked him if he would allow me ton audit his classes. He readily agreed.n
n I could not know at the time that I was about to witness one of the moren esoteric literature seminars given at an American university in 2001. Orn any other university, for that matter.n
n The course covered a subject far from the world of contemporary poetry. Itn seemed to be a course on religion, not poetry, specifically on the Englishn Protestant movement, with which, it soon became clear, Hill was obsessed.n But it wasn’t primarily the religion that he discussed. Instead, in then religious works we read, he focused so much on matters of aesthetic stylen that students of religion must have been vexed. The syllabus was a tourn through Puritan pamphleteering, but conducted, so to speak, by a literaryn dandy. We had to read various translations of the Bible in English in itsn earliest forms: Tyndale, Coverdale, and the like. Hill added manifestos ofn church reform from the Elizabethan Age. One day, the Puritan text undern discussion was “A View of Popish Abuses.” Another day it was the Marprelaten Tracts of 1588. And then Milton’s antiprelatical prose. There were Acts ofn Uniformity. There were the conformists and the nonconformists. Then then dissenters, new and old.
n Hill began the class with a programmatic announcement: “Style is fulfilledn intent.” But he expressly discounted the notion that we should read thesen texts only for the sake of literary style. As he picked strayn lines from various pages to quote, he seemed to turn again and again to then religious origins of style—of what motivations compelled then authors to create these works. In the classroom, he often discussed how then preacher or sermonizer prepared his mind and readied his heart to preach—inn the sense of inspired language. He was generally less interested inn passages of filigreed Latinate syntax than in word-combinations of unusualn fury (I remember “filthy quake-mire” and “a petty little stinking ditch”).n Admirers of his own poetry, as I was, realized these epithets weren inspirations for his own savage phrases.n
n It was not a class on religion, but on religious prose, the abstrusen language of sixteenth-century Protestant political tracts. Could then students follow him at all? They were mostly silent, more cowed thann reverential. The class made sense if you had read Hill’s poetry and prose,n as I had, but was that the case with these graduate students? I could telln that the readings simply floated over the heads of most. It might haven struck Hill with supreme irony that the students he was educating in Bostonn could hardly make anything out of the arguments of Anabaptists, Barrowists,n Diggers, Enthusiasts, Levellers, Puritans, Shakers, Quakers, Ranters,n Seekers, and Unitarians who left England and sought refuge in the Americann colonies.n
n Hill did not seem to mind our silence. In any case, his remarks seemednhardly addressed to us, but rather to posterity. In “On Reading Crowds and Power,” he made his feelings clear on the matter:
n But hear this: that which is difficult
preserves democracy; you pay respect
to the intelligence of the citizen.
Basics are not condescension. Some
tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe
this and pass on. Certain directives
parody at your own risk. Tread lightly
with personal dignity and public image.
Safeguard the image of the common man.
n Besides, he was too busy asking himself questions about the readingn material. I still have some of them in my lecture notes for the class: “Cann the poet, by becoming virtuous in the moral sense, increase his poeticn inspiration?” This was the kind of question that I gathered he was reallyn asking himself during the course, though he never said them out loud. Theyn were like an invisible thread, an obscure cause, behind the actualn colloquy. Does God reward the moral poet in this way? Is the poet thusn entirely at the mercy of God’s intentions? Does the scarcity or difficultyn of a poet’s work reflect some failing in the poet?n
n Of course, these questions were not so much answered as posed—and not son much posed as suggested in the struggle to make sense of the selections ofn Puritan prose. Hill also defined license as “self-assertion leading ton anarchy and self-destruction.” Whether he was thinking of his own life orn his art went unstated. He was always trying to determine whether the powern of words came from a legitimate authority or, rather, from a license thatn writers give themselves that was ultimately full of “self-destruction.” In think he wanted proof that his own poetic talents were being used forn righteousness.n
n At the time, I took it for granted that Hill was a Christian poet. The termn is used as a commonplace in descriptions of him. A man who spent his lifen teaching religion, and whose second wife became an ordained Anglicann minister, hardly seems a candidate for agnosticism. Yet I see now that, inn various interviews over the years, he was prone to hedging, and when askedn directly about being a Christian poet was recorded as saying: “Well, it’s an tag, isn’t it? They tag you with a convenient epithet. I’m reasonably aun fait with the Christian documentation. I’m quite able to use theologicaln terms.”
n His wife sometimes wondered about his faith, and he did, too. When, in an newspaper interview, she reminded him that he had written sensitively onn Henry Vaughan’s and John Donne’s work, he replied in this telling exchange:n
n “Yes, because it’s excellent and fascinating. Not because I suddenly feeln that Vaughan is a brother in the faith or that reading Donne converted men to a love of Christ.”n
n She points out that he kneels at the church altar on Sundays. Her husband,n she says, is “communicant but resentful.”n
n “When did I say that?” says Hill.n
n “You didn’t, I just said it now.”n
n “It sounds like me.”n
n “I’ve been married to you for some years,” she notes.n
n One hopes, however, that Hill was striking a pose here, and not setting then state of his own faith perilously close to faithlessness. That was the cruxn of the matter: Was his religious struggle a kind of intellectual facade?n There seemed a hint of suspicion that Hill claimed the faith for the sheern awkward contrarianism it allowed him, a kind of “spitting in the face” ofn the modern world. I hope not. Maybe he believed his Christianity—orn anyone’s Christianity—was too existential a condition to be reduced to an “tag.” Surely anyone who assigns Puritan pamphlets to twenty-first-centuryn American students is living with and working through a complicated belief.n
n In one poem from his final years, we find:n
[. . .] What is best done
Short of forgiveness
n Spares acquittals gist of noncompensation.
Practical wisdom is a world unbridled.
What you damn well care then bestowing credence?
What does it matter,
Beneficiary of what late bestowal,
One whose father, while he was yet far off,
Ran, received him joyfully, who is nameless
Given that greeting?
n Through the odd diction of this late poem called “Odi Barbare,” we cann trace the outline of the parable of the prodigal son. Hill plays up an winsome element of that sublime moment when the father recognizes his lostn son: Ask no questions, demand no explanation or “compensation,” but onlyn love him. Was Hill finally “given that greeting” at the end? The theologyn that we studied and learned in his class was, I believe, Hill’s way ofn wrestling with his faith and his art. The contest was a close one to then end. I was never quite sure from his teaching whether we were learningn theology to bring us closer to understanding God or to provide us withn difficulties and enigmas that we could only struggle with and accept.n
Garrick Davis is a poet and founding editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review.
