Hill dishes out the thunderbolts in a demanding portrayal of a nation out of kilter
An engrossing study of the cultural politics of modern British poetry could be written through the prism of the late Geoffrey Hill’s work. When he sarcastically echoed the words of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in Mercian Hymns (1971), some readers decided he was signalling unpleasant political attitudes of his own. Interviewed by Robert Potts in 2002, he bemoaned the response to a stray comment he had made on 19th-century “Tory radicals”, the effect having been to associate him with more recent Tory regimes.
The reality of Hill’s political opinions was more complex. He was also more than capable of changing his mind. When Canaan appeared in 1996, it contained an elegy for the plotters against Hitler, wondering sternly if their “martyred resistance serves / to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht”. His swipes at Margaret Thatcher in the same volume appeared to align Hill with an older form of hierarchical conservatism. In the remarkable testamentary volume that is The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, Hill singles out those lines on the Maastricht treaty to publicly recant his earlier views. In passages that will surprise many, he celebrates the Easter Rising of 1916 and compares the laying of a wreath by the Queen in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance to Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto uprising memorial; he even eulogises the leader of the Labour party (“Corbyn must win”). There is scarcely one of the 271 sections in this book that does not assail the reader with the force of a vatic last judgment.
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