A celebration with a warning

Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, there is the risk that new readers, acquainted with the easy-going chattiness of Betjeman, say, or Larkin, may find this writer too dense and allusive. Scenes from Comus is a case in point. Read it once, by itself, and you may struggle. Read it as the envoi it really is to Hill’s previous books, the last four in particular, and you will discover clarity as well as density, as if observing a city from the air.

Hill is 73 now. He has been an admired and productive poet for more than 50 years. His technical skill and distinct voice give pleasure page by page wherever you plunge into his work. As the most intimate form of writing, poetry allows your own introspectiveness contact with others’ introspection. I have not met Hill but I believe that if he rang me up I would know in moments who was calling and what he wanted. This is of course an illusion, but it is the illusion endemic to poetry as an art. Scenes from Comus, therefore, is indeed a pleasure; it must give pleasure, as Wallace Stevens said of what he called ‘the poem of the act of the mind’. But the longer-lived pleasure which demands enlightenment also means wrestling again with the angels of Canaan, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon. These books constitute a ‘matter of England’ epic and Hill’s ‘daily acknowledgement/ of what is owed to the dead’.