Wainwright Jeffrey - Acceptable words : Essays on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Copyright Jeffrey Wainwright 2005

The right of Jeffrey Wainwright to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 6754 9

First published 2005

14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth.

Ecclesiastes 12.10 (AV)

Words are never stone
except in their appearance.

On the Sophoclean Moment in English Poetry, Without Title

To
Jon Glover

Most of these essays have appeared over a number of years as Geoffrey Hills succeeding volumes have been published. I have revised them for this book but have tried to do so in ways that retain their original character as essays responding to the work as it appeared. They attempt to cover almost all Hills poetry, including the remarkable body of poetry and prose published since 1996, and some work yet to appear in book form. The richness of his work means of course that these studies are at best preliminary. They are offered in the hope of benefiting his present readers and being of use to the many studies that will surely follow in the years to come.

I am very grateful to the editors who initially commissioned these essays, especially, and sorrowfully, to the late Jon Silkin of Stand, and the late William Cookson of Agenda. Peter Robinson, Michael Schmidt and Ren Gallet are the other editors I should like to thank.

The initial publications were as follows: Geoffrey Hills King Log, Stand, Vol. 10 No. 1, 1968. Geoffrey Hills Lachrimae, Agenda, Vol. 13 No. 3, 1976. Geoffrey Hills Tenebrae, Agenda, Vol. 17 No. 1, 1979. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pguy, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, ed. Peter Robinson, Open University Press, 1985. History as Poetry: Geoffrey Hill: Churchills Funeral and De Jure Belli Ac Pacis, Agenda, Vol. 34 No. 2, 1996. Geoffrey Hill: The Triumph of Love, PN Review, Vol. 26 No. 5, May-June, 1321, 2000. An earlier version of Beauty is difficult: Speech! Speech! was given as a conference paper at the colloque, La Posie de Geoffrey Hill et la modernit, Universit de Caen, mai 1617, 2003. The title essay Acceptable Words, and the essays on The Orchards of Syon, Scenes from Comus and the Afterword appear here for the first time.

There are many others whose help, conversation, and commentary on Hills work and on my own ideas have been invaluable to me over many years. First among them is Geoffrey Hill who has allowed me from time to time to see work prior to publication. I record my debt to one of the first from whom I learned about Hills work, Ken Smith, who died in 2003. This book is dedicated to my friend of many years Jon Glover who gave me my copy of For the Unfallen.

I have also learned from and thank John Barnard, Laurence Coupe, Sara DOrazio, Ren Gallet, Heather Glen, Jeremy Hawthorn, Avril Horner, John Kerrigan, Jennifer Kilgore, Antony Rowland, Michael Schmidt, Alistair Stead, Peter Walker, John Whale. Of course all responsibility for any failings of these essays rests entirely with me.

I am also very grateful to Matthew Frost and Kate Fox at Manchester University Press and to my copy editor John Banks.

I am grateful to Penguin Books for their kind permission to reproduce from the UK editions of Geoffrey Hills poetry: Collected Poems (1985), Canaan (1996), The Triumph of Love (1998), Speech! Speech! (2000), The Orchards of Syon (2002) and Scenes from Comus (2005). In the USA: excerpts from New and Collected Poems 19521992 (1994), Canaan (1996) and The Triumph of Love (1998) were reprined by pe mission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Excerpts from Speech! Speech! (2000), The Orchards of Syon (2002) and Style and Faith (2003) by permission of Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.

I acknowledge Andr Deutsch for quotations from The Lords of Limit (1984) and Oxford University Press The Enemys Country (1991). For permission to quote from T. S. Eliot Four Quartets (1959) I thank Faber & Faber. For quotations from John Dunn, Political Obligation in The History of Political Theory and other essays (1996), Cambridge University Press.

1 Acceptable words

John Milton, Of Education, Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides, (Harmonds-worth, 1974), p. 191.

Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, (1667) p. 43; George Berkeley, Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, (1710); Isaac Barrow, attributed. All these quotations are drawn from Roy Porter, Enlightenment, Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, (London, 2000), pp. 545.