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Geoffrey Hill: the Quest for Mystical Communion and Community Author(S): Henry Hart Source: Religion & Literature, Vol University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Hill: The Quest for Mystical Communion and Community Author(s): Henry Hart Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 1-26 Published by: University of Notre Dame Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060052 Accessed: 08-01-2016 06:31 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Notre Dame is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Religion & Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Fri, 08 Jan 2016 06:31:32 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions GEOFFREYHILL: THE QUEST FOR MYSTICAL COMMUNION AND COMMUNITY Henry Hart FewAmerican readers had heardof GeoffreyHill when Houghton Mif- flin publishedhis first three books as SomewhereIs Sucha Kingdomin 1975. Harold Bloom's introductionseemed designed to raise the eyelids of a snoozing audience. "Strongpoetry is always difficult,"he declared with a stentorianflourish, "and GeoffreyHill is the strongestBritish poet now alive, though his reputationin the English-speakingworld is somewhatless advancedthan that of severalof his contemporaries"(xiii). With regardto Hill's place in poetic tradition,Bloom contended: "The true precursoris alwaysBlake, and the War in Heaven that the strongpoet must conduct is fought by Hill against Blake, and against Blake'stradition, and so against Hill himself" (xiii).As an Oxford student in 1953, Hill, in fact, had writ- ten a reviewin TheIsis criticizing Blake's Jerusalem for being too diffuse(he preferredBlake's shorter lyrics). And Hill had registeredhis ambivalence towardBlake in earlypoems such as "Genesis,""God's Little Mountain," and "Holy Thursday"(a tide taken from Blake's"Songs"). - Hill's "war"against Blake- if that'swhat it was arose from both sty- listic and philosophicaldifferences. Although he admitted that criticizing Blake'sapocalyptic project was like trying "to quench the furnacesof af- flictionwith one cup of cold water"(22), he neverthelessemptied his cup on Blake'sfurnace. He was not entirelyantagonistic toward Blake, however. He sympathizedwith the sort of Utopianidealism Blake espoused at the R&L 39.1 (Spring2007) 1 This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Fri, 08 Jan 2016 06:31:32 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I Religion& Literature beginningof his long poem Milton:"I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand / Till we have builtJerusalem / In England'sgreen & pleasantLand" (48 1). Hill was also preparedto fight for his ideal England- with his pen rather than with his sword- but he was more skepticalthan Blake about the possibilityof establishingthat ideal. He also disagreedwith the verboseway Blake had articulatedhis Utopian ideals in his propheticbooks. At the beginningof SomewhereIs Such a Kingdom,Hill acknowledgedhis own Utopianidealism by way of an epigraphfrom Thomas Hobbes'sLeviathan: "Sometimesa man seekswhat he hath lost; and from that place, and time, whereinhe missesit, his mind, runs back, from place to place, and time to time, to find where, and when he had it" (10). Having grown up duringthe Nazi horrorsof WorldWar II, Hill's quest for a lost paradise- a "green & pleasantLand" - was spurredin part by his keen awarenessthat during "a time of Warre,"as Hobbes famously remarked,"the life of man [is] solitary,poore, nasty,brutish, and short"(65). Hill'sanxiety about crusades for "Jerusalem"- whether poetic or military- arose from an awareness that quests for Utopiasoften ended up causing the sort of bloodshed and tyrannyUtopias were designed to avoid. Throughout his career,Hill has writtenimpassioned poems juxtaposingUtopian ideals with the historyof fear,suffering, and violent death that made shredsof those ideals. Hill'sreaders have often puzzled over what sortof lost kingdomhe hoped to find and resurrectafter searching "from place to place, and time to time." In his characteristicallyoblique way, he offereda clue in the title SomewhereIs Sucha Kingdom,which alludesto a poem byJohn CroweRansom. Ransom's "SomewhereIs Such a Kingdom" playfullycatalogs a motley group of birds as if they were people, and expressesa wish to escape the chaos of contemporarysociety in order to "see if God has made / Otherwherean- other shade / Where the men or beastsor birds/ Exchangefew wordsand pleasantwords" (23). Ransom undercuts his questfor Platonicand Christian idealsby hintingthat this "Otherwhere"might be an insubstantial"shade" at the backof Plato'scave, an elusiveChristian concept like Eden, or simply a story in a good book. He askshimself: "And dare I think it is absurd/ If no such beast were, no such bird?" Playingon the etymologyof "absurd" (ab-surdusin Latin means "awayfrom the right sound"),Ransom indicates that it's perfectlyreasonable to seek kingdoms of civilized behavior and civilizeddiscourse ("the right sound")even though they may be located in imaginarycontexts. At Oxfordand afterwards,Hill obsessivelyeulogized and elegizedPlatonic andJudeo-Christian "kingdoms" that were as enchantingas they were il- lusory.In his review of Jerusalem,he waxed lyrical over Blake'simaginary This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Fri, 08 Jan 2016 06:31:32 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HENRY HART 3 "Otherwhere"where "the imagination,the true life-sourceof man" flour- ished in an unfallenstate. In a 1954 articletitled "Letterfrom Oxford,"he spoke up for the seemingly absurdquests of modern visionarypoets like himself when he said:"the poet. .hunchedin his mackintoshon the top of a bus in the BanburyRoad, sits apartfrom the crowd. Or he followsin the wake of a vision of life that goes before him and which he cannot grasp,a cloud by day and a pillarof fire by night"(72). AlthoughHill rathergran- dioselycompared his Oxfordbus ride to Moses' trekwith the Israelitesout of Egypt towardthe promisedland (when "the LORD went before them by day in a pillarof a cloud. .and by night in a pillar of fire" [Ex 13.2 1]), he also distinguishedhis quest from Moses' by emphasizingthe elusiveness of its goal. If Moses possessedthe requisitefaith and grace to reach the promisedland, Hill impliedthat he did not. Hill'sideal kingdomwas always beyond the next horizon, alwaysglimpsed but never grasped. Fora poet, like Hill, devotedto divinevisions that remainedfrustratingly "otherwhere,"the literatureof Christianmysticism offered a helpful and consolingguide. Most criticswho have writtenabout Hill have touched on his interestin Christianmysticism only briefly.Hill, it is generallyargued, is too entangled in questions about religiousbelief to actually believe in Christiandoctrines; he is too preoccupiedwith the violent historyof Chris- tianityto contemplatethe transcendentmystery of Creatorand Creation. In his book The UncommonTongue, Vincent Sherry pointed out that Hill's "modelof the poet" is not "WaltWhitman naming the animalsjoyfully in a recoveredEden, but a martyr,an ascetic meting out speech, as though on a rack,to redressthe wrongsof the human tongue"(22). Embroiledin ethical issues relatingto the way language is used and abused, Hill resists the mystic'scontemplation of a Creator and Creation beyond language. Accordingto Sherry,Hill "doubts,if not the validityof religion,at least his own worthiness." Takinga similartack in "TwoModern Christian Poets," Paul Mackintosh comparedHill's "informed piety," with all its self-laceratingcontradictions, to BasilBunting's "mystic perception" that is "inlove with all creation"(205). ForMackintosh, Hill is a Christianpoet in so far as he submitsChristianity to a meticulouscritique: "[Hill's] Christian poetry comes from combining the immemorialportrayal of religiousdoubt with the farmore recent,more radicaluncertainty of the presentcentury" (204). Avril Horner argues simi- larly in "The Poet's True Commitment"that Hill speaks not for himself but for others in the twentiethcentury who felt both drawnto Christianity and skepticalof its propositions.According to Horner,rather than simply express"society's nostalgia for simple faith"or society'srejection of faith, Hill offsetsa "senseof loss concerningthe transcendent"with "theattempt This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Fri, 08 Jan 2016 06:31:32 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 4 Religion& Literature to reintegratesome of the tenets of Christianitywithin a philosophy of languageand theologyparticularly tuned to poetry"(163). Poetry,in short, becomes his substitutereligion, or at least the arena in which he struggles with religiousconcepts and religiousterms. The Dominican scholarAidan Nichols offers one of the most incisive summariesof Hill's agonizing strugglewith faith in his essay "Graceand Disgrace."To Nichols'spoint of view, Hill is not simply a spokesmanfor twentieth-centuryangst and nostalgia;he also speaksfor his own feelings of estrangementfrom the presenceof Christand from the Church'srituals designedto representHim. Alludingto Hill'sinterest in Christianmysticism, Nicholsconcludes that Hill resiststhe temptationto escapehis personalagons in mysticaltranscendence:
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