A note for readers: today’s piece is quite a deep dive into one aspect of a single, very challenging work (Hill’s Pindarics). If Hill is not your thing, you might want to skip to the end where I have gathered a few other notes and recommendations. I think Hill is more than worth the effort, but I’ll be back with something lighter next week.
Geoffrey Hill died eight years ago, in 2016. At the time of his death he was widely acclaimed, hailed even as the greatest living English poet. Having spent nearly twenty years in America, he had returned to England in 2006 and produced a flood of new work in his 70s: the two huge volumes of Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (2013) and Collected Critical Writings (2008), both edited by Kenneth Haynes, are particular landmarks. His work, especially from the 1990s onward, is notoriously dense and difficult as well as restless in its formal experiment, and my impression is that quite a lot of the later poetry has not yet been fully assimilated by readers and critics. A fascinating comment by the French scholar Jacques Darras remarks, quite fairly I think, that it’s just too soon to know how his achievement will be assessed.1 But it’s clear that any committed reader of recent British poetry has to grapple with him.
Hill’s work is so rich, and so challenging, that there is a tendency to discuss it either in the most general terms only, or to treat it piecemeal in a very scholarly mode, explicating specific references or allusions in perhaps just one or two poems at a time and avoiding any broader summary. His later work, in particular, is hard to write about well because there is so much to say about any given line, but at the same time he tended to publish complete collections or sequences in a single (often bespoke) form, which demand to be treated as a whole. Such a combination has a rather silencing effect upon anyone hoping to write anything shorter than a book.
In a recent piece on Pindar, I commented on the striking lack of a Pindaric mode in British (as opposed to French or American) poetry. One reader sensibly asked whether Hill wasn’t the obvious exception to this, not least (as he politely didn’t say) because one of Hill’s late collections is in fact an entire sequence called Pindarics. In my response, I said that I thought despite the obvious importance of Pindar, Hill’s work lacks the signature note of celebration which I take to be the single most distinctive feature of the Pindaric mode in Western literary history. But reflecting on this conversation, it seemed to me that asking one quite specific critical question could be a helpful way to get some purchase on the daunting edifice of a late Hill sequence. (As Keats says in one of his wonderful letters: “Those that gather samphire — dreadful trade! The cliff of poesy towers above me.”2)
So today I want to ask just “What is Pindaric about Hill’s Pindarics?”.3 (Forgive me for setting aside, as a result, a host of other aspects of this remarkable sequence.) The Pindarics are series of 34 poems in the same form: two stanzas of nine lines each, followed by one of only five. We recognise here the outline of the ‘turn’, ‘counter-turn’ and ‘stand’ of the typical triadic Pindaric ode. These are the English terms used by Ben Jonson for the Greek strophe, antistrophe and epode, in which the chorus who were singing the ode first moved round in one direction, then back again in the other, and then stood still. Robert Duncan links this movement to the systole and diastole of the heart, and in his sequence Hill alludes to all three of ways of talking about the structure of a Pindaric ode.4 Here is the third poem of the sequence. (As substack is not very good at preserving line-spaces between stanzas, I have added // to indicate the end of a stanza. These are not in the original.)
Nomen or numen when you meant nomos.
But at this juncture the strophe stands
incontrovertibly revealed, exact,
with bonum simplex and like civitas,
talismanic in the microchip,
power not to descend to the thing done,
the garbling utile. Chemically discharged
Iambus slurs through spoil-heaps, low and thick
and all-tenacious. Cranking forgotten skills //
there must be, somewhere, choices that succeed,
all elements at one within the phase.
People go shuttery, as on a sub
splayed in a crash-dive,
so keep in trim, you and your darling oppo,
is best advice; keep up and take a cause.
While refutation’s in the truth-locker,
the body politic that does not die
and is not answerable to any God, //
returns a form of grandeur, shame for shame.
Power’s not every place that virtue is,
and anarchy by files deploys to order
as if through modes of conduct or of weight:
dactyls advancing against a contrived rest.
The typical Pindaric ode has a much smaller number of triads than Hill’s Pindarics: ranging from a single set of three (Olympian 4 and 11, Pythian 7) to 12 (Pythian 4), with four or five being most common. So should we think of Hill’s Pindarics as a series of single-triad poems, or a single very long triadic ode, or (perhaps best) as something in between? As soon as we move into that ‘in between’ space, we have taken a step away both from Pindar himself and also from what we can broadly call the English Pindaric tradition as mediated by Jonson, Cowley and his successors.
The shape of each individual poem recalls Pindar, but metrically and musically it does so only quite remotely. I think we can say that each of these poems is reaching or pointing towards the reassurance of the iambic pentameter, though often resisting that consolation in the strophe and the antistrophe (the two longer stanzas). Although the line length hovers around the standard pentameter 10-ish syllables, there’s a lot of variation, many of the lines do not have five stresses (four is the most common alternative) and an even larger number are not particularly iambic. We see this in the passage cited above, in which the poem moves towards an iambic pentameter — indeed, a description of iambics in iambics (‘Iambus slurs through spoil-heaps, low and thick [. . .] all elements at one within the phase’) but then backs away from it again. In general, the epodes (the short final stanzas), however, contain a much higher proportion of iambic pentameter, so the poems have this sense of a common shape and direction, repeated over time: an impression of moving toward, at least, if not quite securing, the safe harbour of a familiar (and, we might say, “domestic”) music in the closural passage of each poem.
Broadly speaking, this analysis suggests the thematic shape of the Pindarics as a whole. This is a sequence about the hard work involved, poetically and personally, in finding a way to come back ‘home’. The ‘workiness’ of it is obvious I think from any couple of lines: the poetry is effortful, it makes demands on the reader and the effort of the writer is almost its theme. The epigraph cites Cesare Pavese, and the title phrase of his 1936 collection Lavorare stanca (‘Work is hard’, ‘Hard labour’) is a repeated motif.5 (Cesare is also one of the addressees: I’ll come back to the question of addressee.)
In the transition from antistrophe to epode in the very first poem, Hill alludes both to the work involved in the development of his form (‘protract through stratagem’) and his return to England after many years in the US:
Do not be so abandoned as to care //
what I abuse, back from my rentier
exile among books. These wits I have
protract through stratagem a formal muse
bemused by how late love retracts its term.
Not you, Ces; pax; I’ll talk us sweetly through.
I take the ‘rentier exile’ to refer to Hill’s period in the United States, between 1988 and 2006, with perhaps an allusion to C. H. Sisson’s memorable address to Horace: ‘Teach me therefore you rentier muse.’6 ‘Ces’ is short for Cesare (Pavese).
So the epodes in the Pindarics mark some sort of cessation, homecoming, even resolution. But the entire sequence is embattled and uncertain, ambiguous, granting with one hand what it denies with the other — this is also part of what makes any resolution when it comes feel so hard-won.7 Here — as often in the sequence — there seems to be a contrast between the generic authorial (and authoritative) address to the unspecified reader (‘Do not be so abandoned as to care’) and a specific addressee (‘Not you, Ces; pax; I’ll talk us sweetly through’). The poet’s voice seems to lecture, reprimand or evade the first of these (which sometimes appears to merge with a kind of self-address); to the other he offers here an exception, a truce (‘pax’), even a sort of courtship. Indeed, the sequence ends with a question about its addressee. This is the final epode, from poem 34:
or call collect and have cracked codes put through.
Who is addressed here — surely I would have said?
Such were your lineaments and I missed you—
dare I say? — lord of life; dissertations
lining the epoch where we stand proclaimed.8
Pindar’s odes also rely upon a complex set of interrelated addressees: the wealthy royal or aristocratic sponsor and his house; the victorious athlete, his family and town; the gods; the poet himself; the wider audience.
Aurally, too, the sequence has this tendency to take away with one hand what it grants with the other — to move in one direction, and then go back on it. The epode of the third poem, quoted above, is a good example of that. It seems to offer us, as many of these epodes do, the pleasure and consolation of a resolution into iambic pentameter, only to snatch that away again at the very end, as the final line moves into an unexpected dactylic pattern:
returns a form of grandeur, shame for shame.
Power’s not every place that virtue is,
and anarchy by files deploys to order
as if through modes of conduct or of weight:
dactyls advancing against a contrived rest.
As the poem itself says, the dactyls of the final line work against (but also deliver) the ‘contrived rest’ of the epode. In this sequence, any hard-won repose is very quickly disrupted.
For Hill, the difficulty and remoteness of the form, and the incongruity of its application to modernity — the reaching for grandeur only for it to slip away — seems to be part of the point. As the seventh poem puts it:
Rub two distichs together, wise not to
bet against fire. A view to fail,
repump a washed-up beach ball, palp a god,
cross vows with a convenience metaphor.
All is invention; I am spoiled for choice.
Assign me Pindar’s job-lot, born to sing
modernities traduced or what you will;
homeo-pharmacopeia’s adagia
spilled upon none that reads. Your votes Ile dig — //
I tell a lie — Pindar should live so long
engrossed by fame and fall and techne’s pride,
thriving as mafia in fatal throe.
Techne here is the skill of technique. In his essay ‘A Postscript on Modernist Poetics’, Hill quotes more than once from Yeats’ scathing response to Margot Ruddock: ‘You do not work at your technic . . . When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second-hand — there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface — difficulty is our plough.’ Hill writes at some length about how the ‘resistance of a technique’ and ‘the preservation of formal distinctions’ are essential to the art.9 There has to be a challenge to it: ‘repump a washed-up beach ball, palp a god’.
Pindar also revels in the complexity of his form, and his odes often include images of his own supreme power and skill. Hill’s self-conscious pride in his ‘techne’ is in that sense Pindaric. But Pindar’s odes are driven by celebration, not only or even primarily of himself, or even of the gods, but of specific people — athletes, kings and mythical heroes — for particular achievements of valour, piety, military success or athletic prowess. Hill’s sequence, by contrast, celebrates clearly only other art — that of Pindar himself, of course, with Pavese, Claudel, Dante, Mandelstam, Yeats, Hopkins and Shakespeare being among the most obvious other names and allusions. When it comes to the celebration of the world, Hill is markedly uncertain and constrained:
That is how you bless things, hymn the random,
the pristine, the primeval, the inert;
as when rhymed legend hoicks excalibur
cack-handed out of stock commodity10
That is not to say that the Pindarics are not beautiful, or concerned with beauty. On the contrary, their restless uncertainty, the impossibility of unreserved approbation and the glimpse of a hard-won harbour, always in danger of being lost again, only sharpen the moments of revelation:
Now it is enough, the symbol’s moment,
beauty’s conundrum, rapt and reft-attired.11
In other news, I’m still working through the small flood of comments and correspondence resulting from my piece on Poetry Review. I have received so many thoughtful remarks and recommendations, and made lots of interesting connections as well, so thanks to everyone who engaged with the topic. Here are a few tidbits worth passing on:
— Rob McLennan has been reviewing poetry journals (mostly North American) systematically for quite a while. I really enjoyed exploring his website: this link takes you to his journal reviews in particular.
— the US poetry podcast Sleerickets got in touch and invited me on, so I recorded a conversation with them earlier this week. I’ve never been on a podcast before and I didn’t know in advance what their angle would be, but I really enjoyed talking to Matthew and Alice, who were supremely thoughtful, relaxed and generous hosts. My episode will be up in a few weeks I believe, but they have a huge archive of fascinating conversations to listen to on the website.
— after the Poetry Review piece, I decided that I would subscribe to (or, if that weren’t possible, at least attempt to get hold of) any poetry journal I didn’t already know that was recommended by more than one person. As a result, I’ve subscribed to the Scottish journal specialising in translation Interpret and ordered two recent issues of Shearsman (which I can’t susbcribe to from France, but happily can order locally). I’ve also been impressed by Shearsman’s books, which include, for instance, a number of Indian poets.
— finally, I enjoyed this interview (with some poems included) with John Talbot, a friend and colleague of mine and co-editor of a book about C. H. Sisson. The book itself is horribly expensive: if you are veritably awash with cash, you can buy it here, but we also published a version of the introduction (‘Why read C. H. Sisson?’) here on the substack last year, which you can read for free. John is an excellent poet himself — most recently of a collection called Rough Translation — and I’m looking forward to his next book.
Darras describes Hill as having ‘courageously attempted to forge a path beyond Eliot, Pound and Larkin all at once. Has he succeeded? Difficult to say for now’ (this is from the excellent introductory essay to the French anthology of British verse, L’Île Rebelle, which I discussed here.)
I’m afraid this is quoted from memory and may be wrong. Keats was himself alluding to the part in King Lear IV.6 where Edgar (disguised as a peasant) is trying to convince Gloucester, who has blinded himself like Oedipus, that he is about to jump off a cliff — a poetic fiction within the wider poetry of the play. I’m not sure if samphire is eaten anywhere other than the UK, but the point is that it grows by the sea or in salt-marshes. Edgar pretends that he can see someone dangerously half-way down the cliff, gathering samphire. Edgar is evoking the vertiginous view down a cliff from the top; Keats is imagining looking up at the sheer face of Shakespeare and of poesy as a whole.
There’s a lot of scholarship on Hill, some of which I’ve read in the past. For this piece, I have not revisited anything other than some of Hill’s own critical writing. Do feel free to recommend anything you have found particularly helpful in the comments.
‘But at this juncture the strophe stands’ (poem 3), ‘The fretful strophe I have had replayed’ (poem 17), ‘as though an epode now should take the stand / devoid of counterturn’ (poem 21), ‘when in the counterturn all is absurd’ (poem 24), ‘Systole, diastole, / incur things of the mind, even at no / remove’ (poem 28), ‘These strophes are protracted and it tells.’ (poem 29).
The phrase itself appears in poems 12, 18, 19. Pavese is addressed directly in poems 1, 17, 32, named also in poems 13, 14, 15 and 22 and implicitly in many other poems. Pavese and Pindar are the two most insistent points of reference in the sequence, and any full account of it would certainly need to grapple much more fully with both.
Sisson, ‘Horace’, 32. Another of Hill’s late sequences, Odi Barbare is explicitly Horatian in form.
As Hill himself puts it: ‘One must broadly read, / ambivalent of riposte. Ambivalence! [. . .] I would leave you rich / in such effects remembering my voice; / [. . .] At the seams / tried lines regraft themselves as best they may.’ (Poem 10)
I take lord of life here to allude primarily to Hopkins, ‘Mine, o thou lord of life, send my roots rain’ from the sonnet ‘Thou art indeed just’, which you can read here.
From Collected Critical Writings (2008), 567-8.
This is from Poem 8.
These are the final lines of poem 12.
Thanks for this illuminating dissection of the Pindaricity (or otherwise) of Hill’s Pindarics. I like quite a lot of late Hill, but the sequences that seems primarily driven by his ability to riff on complex formal frames seem the thinnest to me. Tellingly, I think, there’s nothing you could compare them to in Eliot, Pound or Larkin (to go back to the canon cited in your footnote) — all poets who, differently, had a strong feeling for poetry as an impulse that finds the form for its occasion, rather than the other way around.
glad these got their due! and in excellent fashion.