A poet whose poetry makes clear to us his immense erudition is bound to raise questions about the distinction between the creative and critical faculties. Geoffrey Hill, in expressing bewilderment at the idea that the richly allusive nature of his poetry may be reduced to the mechanical trick of ‘turning his scholarship into rhyme and meter’ (Hill, Paris Review), tacitly imputes the allegation to a misreading shaped by crudely dichotomous terms. A misguided reader of this kind perceives a simplistic conversion instead of a synthesis between the creative and the critical processes, and does so because he institutes a naïvely stringent demarcation of their corresponding spheres—the imaginative and the intellectual, or more specifically, poetry and ‘ratiocinative’ (Viewpoints 83) domains such as history, philology, philosophy, or lexicography. Further, because references to scholarly material meet us with giddying velocity at nearly every turn in his poems, one may suspect that there exists behind them the type of conceptual abundance and argumentation more appropriate to the cerebral mode of discursive writing—a mode seemingly antithetical to Hill’s own idea of ‘poetry as a sensuous art’ (Viewpoints 91). This, perhaps, is the sort of misconception that elicited from T.S. Eliot the counter-assertion that ‘[a] philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved’ (“The Metaphysical Poets” 232). At the heart of this confusion between the creative and critical processes in Hill is the surface confluence of disparate modes of rhetoric in his poetry, which in their apparently confused intermingling often obscures the type of rhetoric specific and inherent to poetry itself.
In many of Hill’s poems, such a confluence shapes what might be termed as a peculiarly Hillian rhetoric of failure, crafted precisely because it invokes the following paradox: his rhetoric of failure at times approximates the sense one gets from the ‘failure to truly grasp substance and experience’ (Viewpoints 89), but rhetoric itself is based in part on a principle of identification which, in Burkean terms, ‘attains its ultimate expression in mysticism, the identification of the infinitesimally frail with the infinitely powerful’ (Burke 326). At this point, rhetoric transcends itself in the success of truly grasping substance and experience, reaching a point of ineffability. Hill’s rhetoric, however, ironises this—it abides in the agonising condition of being able to contemplate the ideality of such a state but not being able to experience it. For Hill, the ‘technical perfecting of a poem’ becomes the ‘act of atonement’ (“Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’” 466) that serves as a humanistic consolation for the mystical experience one knows one cannot grasp. And such a process of ironisation often renders the rhetoric of failure meta-poetic and meta-rhetorical: the process of ‘technical perfecting’ is a process in which intellect and thought so closely inform sense and emotion that his poems often ‘hover above [themselves] in a kind of brooding, contemplative, self-rectifying way’ (Paris Review).
It might be useful, before delving into Hill’s poetry, to clarify what is meant by the phrase ‘rhetoric of poetry’, which may seem to be based upon a misunderstood chronology, since rhetoric is concerned with the art of persuasion in discourse as informed by the application of principles one normally considers proper to poetry. The ‘poetics of rhetoric’ would, in this sense, be a more appropriate term. Alternatively, one may tweak the relations within the trivium and adopt the position that ‘if the direct union of grammar and logic is characteristic of non-literary verbal structures, literature may be described as the rhetorical organization of grammar and logic’ (Frye 281). This is the basic assumption that will guide my examination of Hill’s poetry.
When a poem assumes the tone of discourse—an apparently direct union of grammar and logic—semantic displacement occurs, resulting in the surface confluence of disparate modes of rhetoric. At first blush, poem CXXV of “The Triumph of Love” seems to us like a piece of critical argumentation posturing as poetry:
…Tautology, for Wittgenstein, manifests the condition of unconditional truth. Mysticism is not affects but grammar. There is nothing mysterious in grammar; it constitutes its own mystery, its practicum. Though certain neologisms — Coleridge’s ‘tautegorical’ for example — clown out along the edge, τὸ αὐτό enjoys its essential being in theology as in logic. (Broken Hierarchies 277)
Try as we might, the apparently prosaic accumulation of academese like ‘grammar’, ‘practicum’, and ‘tautegorical’ initially evokes in us no semblance of the sensory modes of appeal one expects of a poem, and as a result apparently contradicts Hill’s view of ‘poetry as a sensuous art’ (Viewpoints91). Retrace our steps to the immediately preceding lines, however, and we recall a curiously meta-rhetorical explanation for this: ‘It may indeed be my last / occasion for approaching you in modes / of rhetoric to which I have addressed myself / throughout the course of this discourse’ (276). The self-reflexivity of these lines absolves them of the intrinsic disingenuousness of rhetoric which a proper rhetorician cannot openly acknowledge lest he defeats his own purpose, and consequently exempts them also from being the injudicious sort of rhetoric which must be ‘part of the ontology of moral action’ (“Our Word Is Our Bond” 168) since, as Kenneth Burke suggests, ‘persuasion terminates in the “meta-rhetoric” of pure persuasion’ (326). There is an artful circularity to this; in superficially adopting the critical language of discourse that a reader is likely to find rather unseemly for a poem, and then establishing itself as discursive rhetoric that reflects upon itself, these lines re-institute the poem’s proper identity—the non-legislative and non-executive nature of ‘pure persuasion’ (326) being closer to the province of the poetic. Consequently, we are reminded that the rhetoric of poetry—‘the theoretical organization of grammar and logic’—is that which contains whatever critical jargon we encounter in Hill’s poetry, which is never merely a staid union of grammar and logic ‘put into rhyme and meter’ (Paris Review).
The first section of “Scenes from Comus”, “The Argument of the Masque”, is similarly meta-rhetorical. By forcing an uncomfortable association, for instance, of the discursive nature of argument with the performative spectacle of a masque, the poem foregrounds its own form by contrasting it with performance art forms like music, dance, and drama. What emerges is an oddly placed rumination on ‘the personality as a mask; / of character as self-founded, self-founding; / and of the sacredness of the person’ (421), that appears to be an inappropriately philosophical allegory of a festive occasion. There is something uncanny, too, about the description of spirits making hail-fellow-well-met gestures—‘…Mine / salutes yours, whenever we pass or cross’ (421)—as if the soul were subject to the sublunary ‘masks’ of custom and the physical conventions of a masque. There is a sense here of the language attempting to break out of its own form, perhaps demonstrating Hill’s suggestion that the poem ‘remains to some extent within the ‘imprisoning marble’ of a quotidian shapelessness and imperfection’ (“‘Menace’” 466) of its own form.
Language of occasion has here fallen into occurrence of outcry, reactive outcry, like a treatable depression
that happens not to respond. If fate, then fated like autism. (422)
One also gets a sense here of language breaking out of its duty as a preserver of custom, and disintegrating into a momentary, uncultured and therefore purely intuitive ‘outcry’ induced by the oppressive strictures of language. The lines that follow indicate that ‘[t]here is some notion, / here, of the sea guffawing off reefs, / to which we compose our daft music / of comprehension’ (422), as if to imply that the pathetic fallacy is pathetic not just in the original sense of its root word, pathos, but also the sense of being miserably pitiful. And it is pitiful because it is mere rhetoric—the rhetoric of poetry—based on the ‘lie’ that one is involved in a sympathetic relation to his environment. Language cannot animate the inanimate; the device that makes it seem so is merely a ‘daft music of comprehension’. On another level, it is also a sign that language, and by extension, poetry, have reached their limit and become ingrown; it is the point at which they enact ‘a helpless gesture of surrender’ in striving ‘towards the condition of music’ (“‘Menace’” 472), thus disintegrating into the pathology of ‘depression’ and the defect of ‘autism’ (422), or of the irony of the ‘ultimate integrity of silence’ (“‘Menace’” 472).
While there is, to quote Burke again, always an element of ‘self-interference’ in ‘pure persuasion’ or in the meta-rhetorical, which can ‘derive from many “impure sources”’, and which ‘may become the vehicle of all sorts of private ambitions, guilts and vengeances’, meta-rhetoric is certainly not being offered up ‘as the highest ideal of human conduct’. Rather, such a rhetorical motive can nonetheless ‘of itself supply a principle of interference which, whatever its origin, often as a high ethical value’ in the sense of being able to supply us with an ‘inner check’ (270). In other words, the very existence of ‘impure sources’, such as boasting, necessitates the existence of its opposite—the ‘athleticism of self-denial’ for instance, which is no less impure but is nonetheless high in ethical value. Such an idea rather precisely corresponds with Hill’s explication of the good that writing with an ‘impure motive’ can bring, since, as he implies of Simone Weil, her ‘greatness as an ethical writer’ stems rather ironically from the habits of an ‘obsessional neurotic’ (“‘Menace’” 471). In other words, just as Weil’s guilt may be expiated by the writing which is borne of it, the instances of meta-rhetoric and pure persuasion in Hill’s poetry can similarly be a form in which he atones his guilt—an impure source/motive.
If we have so far established that the meta-poetic/meta-rhetorical nature of Hill’s poetry is intended as a form of ‘inner check’ (270), or atonement, we may now consider how it consciously, through irony, accomplishes this by defining itself against the purest motive—the highest ideal conceivable.
Returning again to Burke, we note that all rhetoric is based on a principle of identification which, when actualised in its highest level, ends up in the verbal condition of the oxymoron—a sign of a mystical identification so vast that all verbal resources are proved to be utterly inadequate. ‘[L]iterary mysticism’, he explains, ‘is a contradiction in terms’, since ‘the mystic’s experience is “ineffable”’, although ‘mystic poetry would… have to “express the ineffable”, given the ‘expressive’ (324) nature of poetry. Hill is, however, as ‘interested in mysticism as an exemplary discipline’ as he is in ‘the psychopathology of the false mystical experience’ (Viewpoints 89). And what he means by ‘at-one-ment’ is a linguistic ‘setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony’ (“‘Menace’” 466) which ought to be distinguished from the pure spiritual experience of mystical oneness. Hill’s poetry is, of course, not mystic in nature. Instead, it ironises the mystical experience. His rhetoric of failure is thus not the same as the mystic poet’s rhetoric of complete identification with all sources of being, which despite being also inherently a rhetoric of failure, is borne of the success in truly grasping substance and experience. His rhetoric, then, is concerned with the consciousness of its distance from such a level of identification—it embodies a difficult, profane effability rather than an inspired ineffability.
Mysticism, in fact, operates on a principle of hierarchy that Hill subverts entirely. ‘The sublime’, Burke notes in the context of Coleridge, ‘resides in moral and intellectual “immensities”’. And when such ‘sublimities are represented by ‘physical objects, like plains, sea, sky, and mountains, they are “moral” because the contrast between us and their might and proportion is forcefully hierarchic’, consequently evoking in one an ‘awed and delighted identification with physical power’ which ‘can call forth a transcendent feeling of personal freedom’. Further, ‘by the paradox of substance, one can imaginatively identify oneself with the mountain’s massive assertiveness while at the same time thinking of one’s own futility’. Such identification ‘thus gives a sense of freedom, since it transcends our limitations’ (Motives 325).
Hill’s rhetoric, however, functions in a manner precisely opposed to this. Poem LXXVIII of the “Triumph of Love” institutes a rupture instead of a ‘meeting of the empirically esthetic and the hierarchical’ (Motives 325). He puts a dampener, for instance, on the otherwise innocuously charming image of ‘marigolds’, mentioning instead their ‘unnatural brightness’, and then troubling perspective even further by associating them with the image of depressive clowns (Hierarchies 261), so that we now perceive marigolds in terms of their sinister gaudiness. Nothing here is ‘uplifting’ in the way that the ‘forcefully hierarchic’ may be because of Hill’s ironising inclination for unmasking the demonic latency of beautiful objects rather than emphasising the anagogical potential of ‘moral or intellectual “immensities” (325). Whatever appeals to the eye in colour or shape must be looked upon with suspicion, and one should not dupe oneself into thinking he experiences a flicker of transcendence from them. The eye, in other words, is directed downwards, firmly on the earth, rather than upwards. If ‘physical objects, like plains, sea, sky, and mountains… are “moral” because the contrast between us and their might and proportion is forcefully hierarchic’ (325), what we have in Hill is a descent to a microscopic vision of things that breaks down the hierarchic, providing us with an awareness of our limitations rather than a transcendence of them:
Whatever may be meant by moral landscape, it is for me increasingly a terrain seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary, conglomerate, metamorphic rock- strata, in which particular grace, individual love, decency, endurance, are traceable across the faults. (253)
Here, moral ‘faults’ are likened to geological fault lines, just as elevated abstractions like ‘love, ‘decency’ and ‘endurance’ are weighted down by the earthiness of physical landscapes. One contemplates not the vast immensity of things, but the disenchanting scientism of natural minutiae. Consequently, whatever hint of transcendence one might get from the spiritually dignified connotations of such terms as ‘love’, ‘decency’ and ‘endurance’ is offset by the geologist’s rugged, sublunary language of ‘cross-section’, ‘igneous’, ‘conglomerate’, and ‘metamorphic’.
The density of allusion in “The Triumph of Love” operates on the same principle, functioning as a leveller of high and low. Just as whatever few references there are to ‘moral and intellectual immensities’ (325) are offset by an equal or even greater number of references to the grimy earthiness of ‘civic concrete’ and ‘Pontic sludge’ (242), Hill grounds his lofty invocations of Classical civilisations and the magnitude of war with his self-deprecating shtick. The military grandeur, for instance, of ‘Britannia’s own narrow / miracle of survival’ (242) and the historical significance of ‘Chamberlain’s compliant vanity’ (240) are interspersed with references to himself as a ‘[s]hameless old man bent on committing / more public nuisance’ and as one whose ‘[i]ncontinent fury wet[s] the air’ (249). ‘The hierarchic judgments that infuse tragic sublimity’, Burke notes, ‘are exemplified in reverse by the devices of the ridiculous’ (326). And Hill himself suggests that in “The Triumph of Love”, ‘it might be perfectly accurate to describe the rhetorical tone as one of tragic farce’ (Paris Review). If there are two contradictory elements in the poem, it is because such a contradiction shatters ‘hierarchic judgments’, and bespeaks a measured response which shuns both the arrogant, high ambition that motivates any attempt to act single-handedly as witness to the atrocities of a whole culture and history, as well as the irresponsible self-indulgence of the ‘confessional mode’ (“‘Menace’” 465). The infusion of farcical elements, then, resolves this conundrum by being a suitably modest and self-conscious way in which Hill acknowledges the scope of his endeavour with humorous caveats indicating that he, ‘[c]harged with erudition’, is ‘put up by the defence to be / his own accuser’ (249). He makes clear to us, then, that his display of erudition in his poetry comes with an awareness of its insolent nature—erudition being a sort of profane, bastardised version of omniscience, which no person should even presume to strive for. And it is this carping awareness of its own insolence that ironically absolves him of it. This is yet another meta-poetic instance by which Hill meets his exacting standards of ‘at-one-ment’—a humble but worthy form of consolation. By infusing ‘tragic sublimity’ with ‘the devices of the ridiculous’ (Motives 326) in “The Triumph of Love”, Hill cautiously avoids the effects of a disingenuously ‘uplifting’ rhetoric. It is thus perfectly consistent with his view that one ‘can simultaneously accept the genuine possibility of consolation in art and be sceptical about the possibility of ultimate consolation’ (Viewpoints 88).
There is yet another way of interpreting the surface confluence of disparate modes of rhetoric in Hill’s poetry in light of this. If ‘mystics…generally emphasized divine inspiration rather than the management of accumulated human knowledge’ (Blair 5), then the sense of overabundance one gets from reading Hill’s densely allusive poetry may be read as a rendering of our state of ‘fallen-ness’. One should note, in light of this, that the erudition of his poetry does not function as a crude representation of encyclopaedic information. Rather, such erudition evokes in us the sense one gets when confronted with encyclopaedic information, that is, the frustration of feeling both a desire for complete knowledge and the awareness of its futility. In other words, it highlights our failure to attain the directness and ease of mystical insight, by requiring of us the slow and difficult process of reading afforded to us by Hill’s equally slow and difficult process of writing. As he notes in LXVII of “A Triumph of Love”, ‘…research / is not anamnesis’ (258). And if anamnesis is a process of re-discovery made possible by our connection to an immortal soul—‘We are immortal’ (286)—the difficulty of fully attaining it is articulated by Hill’s self-deprecating reference to his own bumbling senility—‘Where was I?’ (286)—that persists in spite of his erudition. Instead, the poet has only the difficult and exhausting struggle to arrive at the humble satisfaction of ‘at-one-ment’, the cold comfort of which of which has to suffice.
Further, if the tone and rhetoric of his poetry are characteristically deflated and hyper-conscious of their own failings, it is because Hill is averse to any literary practice that hyperbolically derives positive meaning negatively; there is, he points out in “Our Word Is Our Bond”, an ‘inherent irony in meditating…upon ‘absolute closures of possibility’ in terms so effusive and grandiose’, and a certain disingenuousness in using ‘inflationary adjectives as a true evocation of a poet’s ‘redeeming work’ in the face of ‘the world’s absurdity’’ (166). Any effusiveness, it is implied, is pure gimmick, and perhaps what should instead be felt and described when it comes to his own poetry is the intense poignancy of inarticulacy, and the ‘failure to truly grasp substance and experience’ (Viewpoints 89). The expression of this condition is no real triumph, and warrants none of the effusiveness and grandiosity that should exist only upon the eradication (not mere expression) of that condition.
At this point it may be useful to examine some possible distinctions between what is meant by rhetoric of poetry in the broadest sense, and the various rhetorics of poetry which are peculiar to poets writing in different periods. There are, of course, poetical antecedents that have been vulnerable to accusations of slippages in genre, such as Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”, which was described by a scholar as nothing more than ‘Godwin’s Political Justice put into rhyme’ (Yeats, Essays 80-81). To Shelley’s defence, Yeats wanted to quote the ‘lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show that he foresaw more than political regeneration’ (80-81), these descriptions being explicit proof to him that Shelley had indeed adhered to a rhetoric of poetry proper to his domain. To him, Shelley’s ‘liberty was so much more than the liberty of Political Justice that it was one with Intellectual Beauty’, and it would be crude of a reader to overlook the ‘intensest spirit of poetry’ guiding the ‘philosophical views of Mind and Nature’ (81) which underlie his poetry.
In Hill as in Shelley, ideological preconceptions do not supplant the rhetoric of poetry. They exemplify an intrinsic rhetoric of poetry consistent with their own respective positions in a broader dynamic of literary history, whatever their outward differences. What their different positions in literary history are is perhaps worth examining here. If a more purely Romantic poet like Shelley crafts a rhetoric of visionary triumph and apocalypse consistent with the ‘intensest spirit of poetry’ (81), and ‘Romantic-Modernist[s]’ like Gerard Manley Hopkins adopt a middle way in ‘embody[ing] the positive virtue of negative statements’ (“‘Menace’” 469), Hill makes a further descent and crafts a rhetoric of poetry that tends towards the darker reaches of history, defining itself against the purest of motives—as was mentioned earlier—so that it may heighten the awareness of, and therefore partially atone for, the impurity of our motives.
There are certainly no visions in Hill’s poetry as innocently lofty as that of ‘birds within the wind’, ‘fish within the wave’ and the ‘thoughts of man’s own mind’ ‘[floating] through all above the grave’ (683-686; “Prometheus Unbound” 231), which may be taken as evidence of the fact that ‘a mystic ideality tinged these speculations in Shelley’s mind’ and of his attempt to ‘express, in some degree, the almost inexpressible idea’ (Yeats, Essays 89). And if one were to rush to Hill’s defence against the accusation that “The Triumph of Love” is merely a distorted history of the Second World War put into ‘rhyme and meter’, one is left instead with ‘A draft typescript: caulk on caulk / of liquid eraser, illegible, overwrought, / more like psoriasis or scabies than / genuine inspiration’ (272). These being poetically evocative images of pathetic decay that may perhaps be read as Modernist residue reminiscent of the ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends’ of T.S. Eliot (“The Waste Land” 67).
These attempts to ironise the ideal recur elsewhere. When we come to a poem like “Mercian Hymns”, Hill claims, for instance, that
[t]he ‘murderous brutality of Offa as a political animal seems again an objective correlative for the ambiguities of English history in general, as a means of trying to encompass and accommodate the early humiliations and fears of one’s own childhood and also one’s discovery of the tyrannical streak in oneself as a child. (Viewpoints 94)
If a Romantic imagination like Shelley’s harbours an apocalyptic vision of wisdom triumphing over tyranny, Hill envisions the opposite, and indicts even childhood—the archetypally innocent phase of a person’s life—emblematically with the demonic associations of a tyrannical figure, however obliquely this is done. It was suggested earlier that tragic sublimity operates on the hierarchic judgments implicit in moral and intellectual immensities. Hill is all too wary of exploiting these to the point of excessive aestheticisation, which he would have deemed unethical. Hierarchy in such a sense is also subverted on several levels in a poem like “Mercian Hymns”, where the ‘murderous brutality’ of a king is projected onto ‘the tyrannical streak in oneself as a child’ (94). Through Hill’s peculiar rhetoric, the past is sinuously made contemporaneous with the present, just as the qualities of a king are mapped onto a mere child, and just as the poem rests on the association between ‘public’—‘the conduct of government’—and private persons (81), history and dream (‘he entered into the last dream of Offa the King’). Further, because intrusions of authorial personality in Hill’s poetry are never narcissistically personal in the confessional sense, the poem’s characterisation of the child is left just abstract and vague enough for the ‘objective correlative’ to succeed. What emerges, then, is ‘[n]ot strangeness, but strange likeness’ (111), and one is made to confront the darker reaches of the self rather than its ideal, in order to atone—our meagre consolation.
Caught between the yearning for an ideal and the knowledge of its inaccessibility, the rhetoric of Hill’s poetry, then, leaves us suspended in broken hierarchies in which there can therefore be no indulgent vision of ascent—only a firm eye on earthly atonement, a partial cure for the itch:
Mysticism is no rare thing. True, the attaining of it in its pure state is rare. And its secular analogues, in grand or gracious symbolism, are rare. But the need for it, the itch, is everywhere. And by hierarchy it is intensified (Burke 332).
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