Style and Faith in Geoffrey Hill Karl O'hanlon Phd University of York
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Style and Faith in Geoffrey Hill Karl O’Hanlon PhD University of York English and Related Literature September 2016 Abstract Few post-war Anglophone poets have constructed an intellectual hinterland as rich and problematic as Geoffrey Hill. This thesis examines one crucial strand of his thought: the deeply-implicated, yet uneasy imbrication of poetry and theology, style and faith. In the essay ‘Language, Suffering, and Silence’, Hill proposes ‘a theology of language’, while in the preface to his 2003 collection of essays Style and Faith, he insists that with exemplary writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘style is faith’. Finally, in ‘Eros in F.H. Bradley and T.S. Eliot’, Hill searchingly touches on the central problem in considering art in relation to faith: ‘the fundamental dilemma of the poetic craft [is] that it is simultaneously an imitation of the divine fiat and an act of enormous human self-will.’ This thesis proposes that such a ‘fundamental dilemma’, while a source of anxiety for Hill’s post-Eliotic poetics, energises and enriches his poetry. I argue that Hill’s ‘theology of language’ is derived from two radically-opposed intellectual traditions: one lineage from the philological diligence of the English Reformation, the other from the apotheosis of style in the post-Romantic poetics of individuals such as Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. I situate Hill’s thoughts on the relationship of poetry to religious faith in terms of his intellectual and aesthetic engagements with literary precursors: John Donne, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.B. Yeats. 2 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….....2 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………..3 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………...7 Author’s Declaration…………………………………………………………………8 Introduction Hill’s ‘theology of language’: problems of history……………………………...9 Style and faith: the fundamental dilemma……………………………………17 Methodology………………………………………………………………...31 Chapter One: ‘Fierce with darke keeping’: the perturbed Anglican rhythms of Geoffrey Hill and John Donne ‘God’s grammar’: style and faith in Hill’s reception of Donne……………….36 An Anglican “rhythm”………………………………………………………48 The Middle Way…………………………………………………………….65 The ‘crooked lymbeck’: style and spiritual equivocation……………………..74 ‘Inaccurate music’: Donne’s perturbed Anglican “rhythm”………………….91 3 From meta-theology to meta-poetics………………………………………...98 Chapter Two: Sacred vehemence, magic structures: poetic rhetoric and civil polity in Geoffrey Hill and John Milton ‘No Mean Endeavour’: poetic rhetoric as public speech…………………….102 Energeia: good and malign creative energy………………………………….110 Blind Energy and Blind Mouths……………………………………………116 Sacred vehemence……………………………………………………….....122 Original sin and ‘active virtue’………………………………………………130 ‘Saeva indignatio’…………………………………………………………...136 ‘I would lie to anyone in all frankness’: Milton, fable, and Machiavelli……...155 Chapter Three: ‘Not an innocent occupation’: the perils of poetry in Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins Religious faith after Romanticism…………………………………………..165 Exclamation, prayer, and passacaglia……………………………………….172 ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’: Hill, Hopkins, and creation……..214 4 ‘A sounding […] of his own trumpet and a hymn in his own praise’: Hopkins’s phenomenology of the self, the poetic voice, and the creative paradox………………223 Chapter Four: ‘The Way of Syntax’: Geoffrey Hill and W.B. Yeats – the apotheosis of style? Taking heaven by magic…………………………………………………………….235 The “false mask” of Romanticism…………………………………………………..249 The “true mask” of Romanticism: the Way of Syntax………………………………276 Coda………………………………………………………………………………..297 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..299 5 This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) ‘I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Gerard Manley Hopkins 6 Acknowledgements This thesis owes a great deal to many friends and colleagues. I would like to thank first and foremost Hugh Haughton, for his good humour, sound counsel, and patience with my ever-multiplying variations on a theme. Brian Cummings and David Dwan provided thoughtful commentary on early drafts of chapters. Matthew Sperling responded graciously to my numerous queries, and Kathryn Murphy very kindly sent a copy of an uncollected essay for which I am indebted. George Potts helped date unpublished material, and Jeffrey Wainwright provided useful information about Hill’s teaching at Leeds in the sixties. Kenneth Haynes granted prompt permissions for quotation of Hill’s unpublished writings for articles that emerged during this research. Zoe Harrigan kindly offered technical support. The staff at the Brotherton library at the University of Leeds were extremely helpful during my visits to Hill’s archive. I am tremendously grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this doctoral research, and to the Graduate Fund at the Department of English and Related Literature for supporting research trips and conferences. Many other individuals have sustained me throughout this thesis in various ways both practical and personal, and to whom I give my sincere thanks: James Williams, Tim Curtis and Philippa Morris, Philip Roberts, Charlotte Chester, Megan Girdwood, Sarah Cawthorne, Jack Thacker, and H.J. Hoover: ‘my glory was I had such friends.’ My parents are owed gratitude beyond all telling. Their support, belief, wisdom, and love has fortified me during the tougher stretches in writing this thesis. I return their love, and I hope that this work makes them proud. 7 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this or any other, university. All sources are acknowledged as References. Aspects of the final chapter on W.B. Yeats were first explored in a paper I delivered at the ‘Fall Narratives’ conference at the University of Aberdeen, June 2014. It has since been published as ‘Language and the Fall in W.B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill’, in Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. by Zohar Hadromi-Allouche and Áine Larkin (London: Routledge, 2017). 8 Introduction Hill’s ‘theology of language’: problems of history On 30 June 2016, the United Kingdom still reeling from the results of a referendum on Europe, the poet Geoffrey Hill died. Obituaries and remembrances appeared from all corners to mark the passing of this ‘great European’, as Michael Schmidt described Hill in the editorial of PN Review.1 Early in my doctoral research, I stumbled upon Hart Crane’s elegy for Emily Dickinson. Hill himself wrote ‘Improvisations for Hart Crane’, which first appeared in Without Title (2006); Crane also has frequent cameos in Liber Illustrium Virorum.2 The harvest you descried and understand Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind. Some reconcilement of remotest mind3— 1 Michael Schmidt, ‘Editorial’, PN Review 43.1 [231] (Sept-Oct 2016), pp. 2-3 (2). 2 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Improvisations for Hart Crane’, in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, ed. by Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 512-13. All subsequent references to Hill’s poems are from this collection unless otherwise stated, and given parenthetically as BH. 3 Hart Crane, ‘To Emily Dickinson’, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. by Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2006), p. 87. 9 One could quibble with ‘understand’ – Hill has described himself as a ‘blind- understanding poet’ – but these lines seemed to me then, and do now, as just and memorable a tribute to Hill’s vast, significant body of work as can be imagined.4 One of the most intriguing, vexing aspects of Geoffrey Hill’s oeuvre is what might be termed his “theological aesthetics”.5 I am not referring here to the surfeit of allusions in his work (conspicuous in contemporary poetry) to theology, ecclesiastical architecture and ritual, or Christian mysteries, the ‘imperious theme’ to which the ‘priests and martyrs’ populating Hill’s poems ‘parade’ (from ‘Annunciations’, BH, p. 40); these will of course be given their due in this thesis, but they are not the substantial interest of my study. Nor do I wish to consider Hill merely as a poet of “religious experience”: in his review essay ‘The Weight of the Word’ (first published in 1991), Hill raises the possibility of ‘[bringing] secular scholarship (and poetics and the “fine arts”) into the field of the theological judgement’, only to caution against ‘an effusive post-Symbolism’ – loose critical tropes on “religious” matter, the prevailing tendency which that effort has taken in the academy.6 As Hill further writes, ‘language […] is a doctrinal solution’ (CCW, p. 363). I shall return to this significant point later in the introduction, but my hope is that this thesis avoids mere examination of religious “themes”. 4 A phrase adapted from Andrew Marvell’s ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’, in Hill’s ‘Milton as Muse’ lecture, online audio recording, Christ’s College, Cambridge (29 October 2008) <http://milton.christs.cam.ac.uk/hill.htm> [accessed 15 August 2015]. See also Steven Matthews, ‘Finding Consonance in the Disparities: Geoffrey Hill, John Milton, and Modernist Poetics’, The Modern Language Review, 111. 3 (July 2016), pp. 665-83 (p. 669). 5 This term is adopted, perhaps with license, from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s multi-volume work, The Glory of the Lord: a theological aesthetics,