Geoffrey Hill RIP

[Sheilbh]

Sir Geoffrey Hill – obituary


Geoffrey Hill, Alice Goodman, by Judith Aronson, bromide print, 1984 CREDIT: JUDITH ARONSON /NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

Sir Geoffrey Hill, who has died aged 84, was a poet and scholar whose combative and often impenetrable work led critics to hail him as one of Britain's greatest writers.

His genius – and his durability – were widely acclaimed in his later years, with his election in 2010 as Oxford Professor of Poetry for five years and in 2012 a knighthood, which he accepted to honour his parents.

His abiding theme was culture, and he would keep returning to the question of whether we have the right language to commemorate or lament the past. Hill's poetry abounds in Latin puns, Hebrew epigrams, anagrams, fun with misprints, references to medieval theologians and coded allusions to any critics who have registered unease with his aggression, or what one called his "unearned grandiloquence".

As if to enrage them further, he produced more and more oblique poems which, for all their vatic intensity, he reasonably considered to be modern versions of Pope's Dunciad. Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin came in for particular scorn, and in The Triumph of Love (1998) Hill dismissed the former as "that Irish professor of rhetoric".

That insult was all the more double-edged because of Hill's repeated unwillingness to trust the rhetoric of politicians, advertisers and even poets themselves. For all that, his own work is littered with literary devices. He had a fondness for epanalepsis, and delighted in constructing palindromic phrases: "Providence cited as creditor, who / would credit providence without payment?" Sometimes, if a line or figure seemed too neat, he would flag it up to the reader.

After two lines of crafted pentameters in Speech! Speech! (2000) he backs away to comment: "How formally this begins."


Geoffrey Hill at home near Cambridge CREDIT: CLARA MOLDEN

These self-contradicting ironies ran through his life and work. As an academic he would go about with such a haunted look – "self-caricaturingly martyred", as one friend put it – that secretaries at Leeds University would call him "Chuckles" (a nickname probably coined by the poet Ian Duhig).

But there are echoes of music hall comedy throughout his longer poems; for example: "Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don't / care what I say, do I?" He once claimed, jokingly, that he had learnt as much from Frankie Howerd as he had from John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins. In one poem he colluded with the "Chuckles" tag, only in Latin ("Geffe juvat").

Still, even his wit (which he would comment on – "Who are you to say I sound funny") was something that could make the poet difficult to read (which was something else he would comment on – "Don't give them any more / to work on...").

He was aware that he was difficult, but would scoff at people who said his work was inaccessible. "The word accessible," he wrote, "is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs."

Just as puzzling is how a poet who was so dismissive of a large readership should have reacted in so prickly a way to the reactions of readers. His work can be seen as an extended dialogue with an uncomprehending but bemused audience, who will have read in The Orchards of Syon (2002): "I desire you / to fathom what I mean. What do I mean?"

And even as he is scowling at the trappings of popular culture, he shows familiarity with it. His more "street" language is strangely up to date – "IN YOUR FACE!" and echoes of Paul Celan or Calderón de la Barca sit alongside nods to Elton John or Monica Lewinsky: "(Rum place for a cigar, Herr Präsident...)".

This shows culture and memory to be high among his priorities. Hill's knowledge of music, poetry, art and philosophy was always embedded in a wry assessment of the world around it. His ultimate concern was how to honour the memories of things or people worth honouring.

These would include the victims of pogroms, whether they were Nazi atrocities or the horrors of Clifford's Tower in York in 1190; or the victims of war in Africa, such as Colonel Fajuyi, who died for showing hospitality to a guest when Igbos wanted to kill him in 1966; or the poet Christopher Okigbo, who was a casualty in the Biafran war. He would also honour those before him who had paid similar tributes in previous generations. For all his apparent hostility to the world, he called himself a "praise singer", and earned a place among the praise singers of the past.

He admired the Elizabethan Catholic martyrs, such as Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion, who were, he explained, "transcendently fine human beings whom one would have loved to have known. The knowledge that they could so sublimate or transcend their ordinary mortal feelings as to willingly undertake the course they took, knowing what the almost inevitable end would be, moves me to reverence for them as human beings and to a kind of absolute astonishment. The very fact that they lived ennobles the human race, which is so often ignoble."

None of this public damning or feting prevented him from writing intensely personal poetry. The longer, later poems often document a private battle with depression, and are revealing about the medication, such as lithium, that it took to produce them. However open he was about this, he still saw it as "ammunition to those who don't like me ... they say 'Hill has just turned the tap on and now he can't turn the tap off.' "

After these struggles throughout the three biggest texts – The Triumph of Love; Speech! Speech!; and The Orchards of Syon – that last work stands as a kind of Paradise following on from the preceding Hell and Purgatory, and it tenderly evokes the landscape he knew as a boy.

Geoffrey William Hill was born at Bromsgrove on June 18 1932, to William, a police constable, and Hilda Hill, and grew up in the nearby village of Fairfield. Geoffrey ruled out following his father into the constabulary, or joining the Armed Forces, because from the age of 11 he was deaf in one ear. Fortunately the condition did little harm to a lifelong love and intimate knowledge of music. He quickly decided on an academic career, and in 1950 left Bromsgrove County High School for Keble, Oxford, where he took a First in English.

His mother was a reader; his father not so much. Geoffrey had won Palgrave's Golden Treasury as a prize at Sunday school and "fell in love", hoping, he remembered 70 years later, "to do something that might equal or exceed the mysterious beauty of these things". His first poems appeared while he was still at Oxford, in Donald Hall's Fantasy Poets series.

His debut piece, "Genesis", portended much that would follow: the pastoral imagery, the wrestle with faith, and ultimately the violence. "There is no bloodless myth will hold," he wrote, in contemplation of Christ's sacrifice.

He went on to teach at Leeds University, where he would appear in a gown to deliver lectures that students remember as being "Byronic". His status was enhanced by his growing reputation as a poet. In 1959, For the Unfallen appeared. It is a mystical work, composed with scrupulous regard for formal verse and conventional genres.

From then until 1964, he wrote more sporadically. He had married Nancy Whittaker in 1956, and had four children with her. The marriage was dissolved in 1983.


'Like a craggy James Mason': Geoffrey Hill

He published a seminal collection, King Log, in 1968. There, the wilful ambiguities and the tick of interrupting himself with heckles such as "Tasteless! Tasteless!" become a regular feature. This volume secured his reputation for playful seriousness. It opens with one of his most anthologised poems, "Ovid in the Third Reich", a distilled reflection on the degree to which a poet can be innocent of the horrors around him.

His notes on "Funeral Music", a series of sonnets partly set at the Battle of Towton of 1461, are keen to establish just how much blood was shed. ("One finds the chronicler of Croyland Abbey writing that the blood of the slain lay caked with the snow which covered the ground and that, when the snow melted, the blood flowed along the furrows and ditches for a distance of two or three miles.") Hill uses the personae of slaughtered historical figures to say something about our common mortality, writing in the final sonnet of the series:
"If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us – or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end 'I have not finished'. "

The sudden entry of the personal endearment is characteristic; he is writing of a bloody world in which love, somehow, must survive.

In a later series of controlled quatrains on Charles Péguy (1983), he readily identifies with a man moved by ideas of regeneration and sacrifice.

In 1976, Hill became professor of English at Leeds. From 1981 until 1988, he was a lecturer at Cambridge, and a fellow of Emmanuel College. His voice and readership were firmly established with the further volumes Mercian Hymns in 1971 and Tenebrae in 1978, and critics divided between agog interpreters and baffled detractors. When Penguin produced a Collected Poems in 1985, they tackled the problem head on; the blurb printed the negative gobbets alongside the more positive comments: "unbearable, bullying, intransigent, intolerant, brilliant," wrote one commentator, while others offered, less ambiguously: "inaccessibly obscure and strange and mannered" and: "glowering, unlovely egotism".

In 1988 he was appointed professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. The title is apt for someone whose later work was so preoccupied with language and redemption. From this point longer works appeared quickly, at roughly two-yearly intervals, beginning with Canaan in 1996. The Triumph of Love is a free meditation on the power of words in an age that follows Auschwitz, beginning and ending with a one-line stanza. The former reads: "Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp"; the latter replaces "a" with "the", as though an attention to detail is at least a start. Much in between has the tone of a learned essayist.

The next long poem, Speech! Speech! (2000) is stricter, and in it the poet fulminates against what he calls "inattention" (among other things). Two years later, in The Orchards of Syon, Hill writes elegantly about music, as if this might offer an escape from the circular bouts of self-probing and lacerating. "Does music / know or care how it sounds?" is, in Hill's language, a note of hope.

As an academic he would go about with such a haunted look – 'self-caricaturingly martyred', as one friend put it – that secretaries at Leeds University would call him 'Chuckles'
Briskly after that, he wrote a sequence called Scenes from Comus, which appeared in finished form in 2005. It may have been his strangest volume, but it contains such gems of self knowledge as this: "That from this noise, this mêlée, there issues / a grand and crabby music. And that I / want my piece of it. Even when not mine." It was set to music by Hugh Wood.

In 1988 he married Alice Goodman, 26 years his junior; she is best known for writing the libretti for John Adams's operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and in 2006, having converted to Anglicanism, she became the chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge. It was the beginning of a productive, happy period for Hill, even though he would grumble in his poetry about people to whom the Nobel Prize did or did not go. A lyrical collection came out in 2006, Without Title, showing him to be more reconciled to ageing, and more at peace with himself.

Next came A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), more direct in style, and then Oraclau | Oracles in 2010, Clavics (2011), Odi Barbare (2012) – culminating in the 1,000 pages of Broken Hierarchies: Collected Poems 1952-2012.

Hill's wide-ranging essays on writers, philosophy and language were collected in The Lords of Limit (1984, the title taken from an Auden poem), The Enemy's Country (1991), Style and Faith (2003) and Collected Critical Writings (2008).

By now he had fought off his mental illness, which he later considered to be obsessive compulsive disorder, started taking anti-depressants, and, following a heart operation, would pound at an exercise bike while working through a detective novel. He moved back to Britain in 2006 and settled in a rectory near Cambridge.

Hill was an odd mixture in his appearance: resembling, in youth, a slightly more craggy James Mason – and in old age, Jeremiah; he was both a dandy and a tramp, wore a paisley silk cravat and a Harris Tweed jacket above Tesco's jeans, slightly at half-mast. He complained about status but would trudge to a student poetry event in a damp upstairs room in Headingley. His voice boomed and rasped, but his eyes twinkled. He knew that he could be funny and also a funny spectacle. Above all, the figure in the lonely tower was also a reliable friend, a conscientious teacher and a loving husband.

He is survived by his wife, their daughter, and three sons and a daughter from his previous marriage.

Sir Geoffrey Hill, born June 18 1932, died June 30 2016

Very sad to read the news today. He was I think one of the greatest English poets of post-war era. He was also receiving an honorary doctorate when I graduated. He had a huge white beard and, in his red robes, looked like an angry santa fixing us all with an Old Testament gaze. It was a very exciting time for the English Department because most of the academics loved him and I think every student there studied at least September Song.

One had a a couple of anecdotes of trying to get his comment/thoughts on some criticism he was writing about Hill. He sent an essay to him on Hill and Heaney. Hill replied on a blank postcard simply pointing out three typos

Also seems a sadly apt death because he was an exceptionally English poet, his Mercian Hymns especially. As Andrew Motion put it England - the matter of and the matter with - was his great subject

[The Brain]

Never heard of him. RIP old dude.