From Southport to Sarajevo
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/geoffrey-hill
“Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power, Hill planted the seeds of style and concern that he has continued to cultivate over his long career. Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy. In early collections such as King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought “to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,” according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. “He deals with violent public events. … Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.””
eoffrey Hill’s ”Triumph of Love” is a book-length meditation on ”the fire-targeted century” now ending, an elegy for everyone who has burned. I say elegy, but in fact the poem is a carnival of literary kinds: it incorporates schoolboy gags, theological excursuses, radiant landscape pictures, mock litanies, epigrams, London music-hall routines and seething political satire. Hill rapidly shifts from one mode to the next as he proceeds through the poem’s 150 separate sections, some of which are as short as one line, some as long as a page and a half. The poem’s aim is to honor faith and innocence as embodied in victims of historical violence, above all the European war dead and the Jews of the Holocaust. It is an aim Hill has kept before him almost continuously since ”For the Unfallen” was published in 1959, the first of his eight books of poems. Always an exquisitely, even excruciatingly self-conscious poet, he now turns on himself with fresh intensity, interrogating his aims and means even as he defends them. One of the poem’s parodic voices (a stand-in for a public that would prefer to forget about its debts to the dead) wonders, ”What is he saying; / why is he still so angry?” The uncomprehending question is its own reply.
How my heart sings 