Geoffrey Hill - Scholar or Loather?

There are two things that can look the same or sufficiently similar to deceive us. On the one hand there is a proper scholarly respect for accuracy, truth, precision coupled with a coherent intellectual respectability. Added to this is a proper historical perspective of ideas and merit, and a proper respect for the shining, spreading metropolis that past culture represents when placed alongside the narrowly parochial and often impoverished and mistaken concerns of the zeitgeist. Then, on the other hand, there is disgust for the common man and the real people one lives alongside in the present veiled in a donnish fastidiousness. The latter, in truth, hates the common man and sneers at him in its heart. Perhaps Faust was a type for the latter although I don’t know enough about the character to be certain. It is certainly possible to create a hierarchy with oneself at the top on the basis of mere intellect without reference to the heart or the moral. This gives many dessicated, intelligent, but over-cerebral people a kind of comfort that they need not have, or are incapable of having, truck with the common man.

Thus the scholarly tradition can be hijacked and used as a disguise for a kind of insulating arrogance or puritan disgust. One can add to this another tradition which often operates in proximity to that. This is the tradition of high-browed, high Modernism in which Hill’s poetry operates. It too has a tendency, or a temptation towards looking down on the common man from a high intellectual tower. It can create literary priesthoods of ‘understanders’ who comfort and flatter themselves with their own lofty understanding.

Geoffrey Hill came from a humble background and defended himself against accusations that the difficulty of his poetry laid him open to being perceived as an intellectual elitist by insisting that difficulty was, in truth, ‘democratic’. However, reading his work, as it constantly sends one scurrying after the most recherché of references, one wonders what exactly he meant by that.

A true literary great is likely to be at home with scholarship, to be adept with words and their meanings and to have a good historical perspective. However, on the moral level, he or she is also likely to have an understanding and affection for the real people with whom he or she shares the planet. This would be especially true of a novelist, for example. Tolstoy and George Eliot, for example, are notable for a wide human sympathy in addition to their intellectual genius.

In Hill’s case one wonders whether what one is witnessing is really a kind of misanthropy masked behind the outward appearance of donnish rigour, curmudgeonliness and an insistence on a Professor to pupil dynamic between himself and his reader. It’s fine to have low expectations of humans and be aware of their fallen-ness but the correct moral response towards one’s fellow is, at bottom, an underlying love, not least because one is, after all, one of them. If one were being kind to Hill one might suggest that there is a pathology at work (he spent most of his life suffering from clinical depression and his late poetic prolixity is explained, even by him, as the result of his taking Lithium – this might lead one to ask what the value of such effusions are) but, if not, one might suspect a kind of moral corruption in his relationship to the human race as it presented itself to him in his own time.

I find a visceral, constitutional inability to stay for long in the presence of his poetic persona. I sense proper academic rigour but I also sense that it may be taken to the lengths and be the product of  a haughty inimicality and contempt perhaps, at base, derived from an inability to relate happily with ordinary people. The poetry, rather than being democratic, seems to divide people into a very small group of initiated illuminati and the rest of the race.