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Poetry since 1945
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Shaft (1978) are direct examinations of continuity and change: this goes
against the notion that most contemporary poetry is about chaos and
disorder. Some poets do indeed concentrate on breakdown, Sylvia Plath
in particular. But Tomlinson, Hill, and others take the constants of their
landscape as the basis of their work. For Hill, this means the landscape of
Mercia, as in Mercian Hymns (1971) which celebrate, in a kind of prose
poetry, Offa, ‘the presiding genius of the West Midlands’ in early English
history. Where Plath’s violence is emotional, personal, suicidal – Collected
Poems (1981) – Hill’s is latent, hidden in the past and brooding to produce
perhaps the most complex and allusive of recent poetry.
In an essay entitled Englands of the Mind, Seamus Heaney discusses
the poetry of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. He contrasts
Hill’s primitive landscapes and Larkin’s city-scapes. Hill is a poet of
another England; he searches for the roots of English identity, in
historical, linguistic, and cultural terms, in the region of Mercia – the
West Midlands. Hill’s search is not far removed from Heaney’s own
digging into the depths of his own Irishness. In this extract from
Mercian Hymns, Geoffrey Hill celebrates the work of English needleworkers,
in echoes of the Victorian celebration of mediaeval work
found in the works of Thomas Carlyle and William Morris:
In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as
it was enacted, the re-entry of
transcendence into this sublunary world.
Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery
riddled by needles: the silver veining, the
gold leaf, voluted grape-vine, masterworks
of treacherous thread.
They trudged out of the dark, scraping their
boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm.
They munched cold bacon. The lamps grew
plump with oily reliable light.
C.H. Sisson shares Hill’s fascination with the genius of the past,
especially distant English and classical history. His Collected Poems
(1984) shows a wide span of reference, a concern with the fallen
nature of man, and a rich range of cultural images.
Edwin Morgan is one of the foremost Scottish poets of the century.