Abstract
Geoffrey Hill's ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis, a tension illuminated by his adumbration of an exemplary poetics. ‘Exemplarity’ is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity, so that a poem can be ‘exemplary’ through its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become especially significant in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work) an increasingly revealing element in his writing.
Highlights
Geoffrey Hill made both of the above comments within one relatively short address—a reading with commentary held at the Collège de France in March
For Hill, what might look like divergent sentiments form part of a unified theory of poetry’s public position, which he summarizes as follows: ‘Poetry is an art of public significance while at the same time I recognize that poetry has no public.’. His conviction that a poet’s autonomy and hermetic refusal to court public attention renders him or her more rather than less relevant to civic life derives from a long-standing non-consequentialist vein in his ethics, manifested most consistently in his preoccupation with ‘intrinsic value’
On how the intrinsic might become extrinsic, on how the value inhering in literary choice eventually translates to its political correlate
Summary
Just as the twilit ‘Peacock at Alderton’ gathers his ‘fulgent cloak’, Hill, increasingly, guards against the advancing dark by gathering his own cloak of luminaries. Hill has explicitly stated that ‘the point of the poem is in the final line’ —the line which repeats the explanation Willy Brandt gave for falling to his knees instead of speaking before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial: ‘I did what people do when words fail them’ This poem is a reflection on how pictorial forms of remembrance might fare better than words and fall short in their own ways. Is gesture is complicated, by a reductive element in the denotation of the individuals, as they are defined in relation to their employment (‘hirelings, the resourceful’, ‘secretaries and translators’) or through a dehumanizing synecdoche which substitutes the whole individual for a specific part of their person (‘the excellent heads of hair’) Before this ambivalence is even encountered, the opening lines hint at the ultimate impossibility of attempts at retrospective justice: an impossibility both for the poem and for the ‘coffee-table book’ of photographs on which it reflects: ‘It is not a matter of justice. By dwelling on the alternatives to language he sheds light on how and why verbal art falls short when poets—including himself—attempt to remember and atone
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