Is Geoffrey Hill the greatest living English language poet?

[WICKES]

What do you think?

[Lykren]

No, he's six and a half points below Ashbery.

Sorry I haven't read much of his actually. Any taster poems you'd recommend?

[YesNo]

Here's a poem by Hill, "Funeral Music": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178127

In this poem, I can see that Hill is recalling some people who were beheaded 500 years ago and so he will be focusing on death and dying. The poem rambles in that 20th century elitist way where one phrase does not quite follow and jars the reader not into understanding or enlightenment but into confusion. It doesn't get to the point and that makes the reader suspect that the poem has no point, but is presented as a puzzle the reader is expected, because the reader is ever the underdog of 20th century poetry, to waste time on.

[Lykren]

Walking up a flight of stairs is a waste of time too; we could install escalators everywhere. But I don't notice people complaining so vehemently about that as they do about apparent elitism in poetry. How dare someone express a thought that is unpleasant to us in terms which confuse us? The nerve.

[Pierre Menard]

He's an incredible poet. Definitely one of the finest living, but I have no desire for specified rankings. I highly recommend his collected poems.

[Lykren]

I highly recommend his collected poems.

Yeah, I'll get around to it; for now I'm on a giant prose quest. But is there any little appetizer you could select to serve up to us?

[Lykren]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178127

Fantastic, by the way! What a meaty sense for sound. I like how he puts down an ethereal stroke ("ghosting upon stone/Creatures of such rampant state") then transitions to blunt force ("For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain—/For none but the ritual king?). He's light on his feet to enact such versatility in so short a piece.

[Pierre Menard]

Yeah, I'll get around to it; for now I'm on a giant prose quest. But is there any little appetizer you could select to serve up to us?



I'll post a particular stanza that is part of a larger cycle of poems that has always stuck with me:

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. 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’."


It moves me every time I read it.


It's hard for me to post specific poems, because my experience with Hill wasn't one where a particular poem jumps out at me right away and I'm immediately hooked, which happens with some poets, but rather, I spent weeks poring over his work, and the richness of it became apparent the more effort I put in and the more I read in succession. Similar to my experience with Stevens and W.B. Yeats (who are now in my top few favourite poets of all-time), it was a process of immersion rather than poems jumping out at me. When you get the chance, dive in to the collected poems. If not that option, then I find http://www.poetryfoundation.org a good site to get a sampling of poets work.

[Lykren]

That's amazing.

[cacian]

Walking up a flight of stairs is a waste of time too; we could install escalators everywhere. But I don't notice people complaining so vehemently about that as they do about apparent elitism in poetry. How dare someone express a thought that is unpleasant to us in terms which confuse us? The nerve.

how do you mean a thought unpleasant?
oh and Lykren is that your avatar picture?

[Lykren]

I think YesNo felt the poem to be unpleasant. I was making fun of his reaction.

Yes that is my avatar. She's a member of the Korean pop group Apink, though I don't know her name.

[YesNo]

I think YesNo felt the poem to be unpleasant. I was making fun of his reaction.

Yes that is my avatar. She's a member of the Korean pop group Apink, though I don't know her name.

Actually I thought it to be confusing without providing any enlightenment. Sure, I know it is about people being decapitated. There is a sentimentality about death that one can grab onto in that context and project into the poem without the poet having to write a single word.

I also like your avatar.

[Eiseabhal]

Well he has qualities but "greatest"? No He takes his place and will be remembered but there are lots of just as good and very different poets using English. No doubt he is to your taste. Frankly Ashbury goes over my head. Daffy Duck in Hollywood! What amazes me is the articulacy of an imaginary duck.

[WICKES]

Well he has qualities but "greatest"? No He takes his place and will be remembered but there are lots of just as good and very different poets using English. No doubt he is to your taste. .

I haven't read a word he has written, but I heard him referred to as the greatest living poet in the English language and was wondering what others thought of this. He seems a little too academic for my taste. I'll stick to Tennyson, Betjeman and Larkin I think!

[Eiseabhal]

There's a lifetimes' reading and re-reading in these fellows. I enjoy Tennyson. I am moved by B. I admire L. It was just a few nights ago that I listened online to a recording of T reading part of The Charge of the Light Brigade. One of what Orwell would have called the good bad poems in English. Wilbur and Walcott seem to me to be pretty clever fellows and full of variety. But like I said I think the field is pretty big.

[JBI]

I confess I never particularly cared for his work. Not that he is too difficult for me to understand, though I think he has not developed well of recent, and that his reputation as a sort of intellectual's poet, or a sort of neo-Eliot has turned him into a sort of late-Henry James of verse. Too baroque for me I guess, lately I feel much of his sentiments are not worth the amount of effort I have to put to kind of get at them; sometimes I feel he is just too deliberately opaque.

[mortalterror]

You know how different isn't always the same as creative? Sometimes it's just weird. Difficult isn't the same as profound. I view the works of Geoffrey Hill and his kind of artist as inhabiting a world of intellectual onanism closer to crossword puzzles than true philosophy and the finest poetry.

[ennison]

He's very English and regional. Without building him up too much he does repay reading. Bunting was another such who on first reading seemed a complex English Pound (Even down to the appearance) but was an interesting poet.