Geoffrey Hill, Professor of Poetry gives a public lecture three times a year and yesterday was the last of this academic year. So, after work yesterday I drove into Oxford and parked the car in St Giles, then walked across town to the Examination Schools. Timing was tight: the lecture started at 5:30pm.
The air, as I walked through town (no one here calls Oxford a city, although it is) was smelling wonderful, while the threat of rain gathered in graphite smudges over the honey stonework of Oxford’s ancient buildings. Of course I didn’t have a raincoat or umbrella.
The halls are beautiful: I had heard so, but had not previously been inside. As I sat in the large T shaped room a few rows back from the seats at the very front, waiting for the arrival of the professor I gazed about looking at the powder blue ceiling with its intricate plaster work, the oak panelled walls, and the tall windows with the leaded panes. Upon arrival I had been directed from the marvellously tiled hallway down into the bowels of the building (rather appropriately perhaps?) to find a ‘ladies’ – then walked up through a beautiful hall and up a wonderful staircase to find the venue. I was rather overawed. I was also rather exhausted by lack of sleep and coming straight from work!
“Have you read any of his work?” asked a friend who had arrived at the same time as me.
I admitted I had not. Had she? Yes, she had. How was it?
“A bit difficult,” she said. “I hope he isn’t boring.”
The title of the talk was ‘Poetry and Disproportion’.
The professor came to the podium and sat down.
“The first thing to ascertain,” he said, “is that this is working: are you all hearing me?” Or words to that effect. No pre-amble.
Talk about your ‘archetypal’ professor.
(Think Dumbledore here without the cloak, as a starter, to get you in the right place.)
Prof Hill has a large expanse of cranium with a semi-circle of grey hair. The bony sutures of his skull are semi-visible, through his taut bare scalp, giving a vague impression of additional hairless eye brows half way up his forehead. Maybe it was the lighting, and the fact that he read from his notes while sitting, with his head inclined downwards? And he has a huge untamed white beard and half-moon gold-rimmed glasses, worn low down on the nose. Last night he wore a black shirt and a tapestry effect waistcoat in rich reds and golds.
His voice is sonorous and weighty… with considered repetition of certain phrases for emphasis. Occasionally there was a change of tone, a hesitation, a little disequilibrium of style. He’d stumble over a word with a mispronunciation and repeat it until it was right. And then on a couple of occasions he’d stop reading the script and loudly clarify something he’d just read, revealing his dry, witty highly academic sense of humour. It was a rambling and focused discourse, of course, leaving me with the impression of a rather fierce yet vulnerable personality of a highly intelligent man. It was these stumblings that humanised him, and for me bought him down from the pedestal. However I was also left feeling rather inferior in terms of mental capacity.
I can’t pretend I understood all of his lecture. My notes are pretty fragmented. My head was bouncing with trying to take it all in. He referred to and cross referenced many and various writers, painters and poets. A discussion first on disproportion and proportion, led to Shakespeare, disequilibrium and Brecht, and William Morris, including the quote ‘ingenuity of the oppressed’ – and ‘analytical plutocracy‘ (?) Then Pieter Bruegel the elder and the painting Mad Meg (Dulle Griet) cropped up several times.
I have jotted down AG Rossiter ‘Angels with Horns’ 1961, on Shakespeare, ‘Unstable Equilibrium‘ ‘The Golden Mean’ ‘Under the authority of his pen‘ ‘ethical readings in an ethical and non-ethical context’ and ‘creative potentiality,’ and another – ‘art in the metrosity ‘.
Geoffrey Hill described himself as a Ruskin Tory. He stated that Ezra Pound wrote some of the best poetry of the last century: but that this poetry was written by a man who was a wicked fascist.
I obviously have a great deal to learn. A huge amount to look up and follow up… so far I have only read some of the links provided above. And I know they are mainly Wiki, but they provide a starting point!
Here he is in a trimmed state.
Last night he was more like this:
Then, once I’ve done all the reading I’d like to come back and hear it all again, from a slightly more informed point of view.
When I came out into the open, the air had been sharply refreshed by a light smattering of rain on the pavement, giving the birds and traffic that clearer sound quality that only comes after rainfall….as I people dogged my way back to the other end of town my head was tight with listening. I had an hour before my writing group, which I spent very enjoyably in Cafe Rouge with a glass of sauvignon blanc and a rather delicious plat rapide while I scribbled notes and felt like a real student.
Boadicea's Chariot 
‘Ingenuity of the oppressed’
Any chatterati that could have coined such a euphemism has obviously never been either!
All I can say is thank God I studied sciences. Verbosity of that ilk would have had me join the Red Brigade for some peace and quiet.
It’s a good thing we are all different, Christina.
He does look like the archetypal eccentric academic, doesn’t he? I had a few of those too, at uni – although, at my uni, there were two extremes in the nineties. First, you had your shaven headed Marxists and lesbians, who said that the whole of the English literary canon should be dispensed with because it was ideologically unsound…and then you had your fruit cake old academics who would practically sing Milton and Donne at you as you walked through the door. I spent years, actually, wondering why I could not force myself to dislike Milton and Dryden and Spenser… then realised that it was nothing to do with me; it was simply because the Department of English Literature was at war with itself, in a clash of ideologies and politics.
Wow, Nym, how interesting and much to think about. I’d love to have attended.
I’m sort of on Christina’s side here.
I gave up Eng. Lit. at fourteen because I couldn’t see the point of dissecting a piece of prose, a poem or a play – it’s the ‘whole’ that matters. It’s akin to dissecting a flower, looking at the bits and pieces and then exclaiming how beautiful it is!
I haven’t changed my opinion.
Ah, Boadicea.
I did English A’Level and I loved it. I also did an OU course, but didn’t complete it because I went back to work and didn’t have the time.
Don’t regret a moment of it.
Yes, it is the whole that matters but I doubt that I would have really understood Chaucer or Shakespeare and etc, without some sort of guidance. It added to the enjoyment, in my case.
Araminta
I’ve always thought that I might have enjoyed it had I’d been subjected to that ruthless dissection a little later. I was still at the point of being mesmerised by the language.
It would have been far better had I seen a Shakespeare play before it was chopped into little pieces. Somehow, class reading of plays and poetry do not do the beauty of the language justice!
Boa: but that is the very reason literature is paramount, to me. You can dissect it, grammatically, or in terms of lexis, which I like doing from a linguistic perspective, you can see it as a window on the great truths of human experience, as a smattering of glittering stars on the darkness of life which you can link into a bigger philosophical picture, like the constellations; you can see it as a candlelight inside our minds, aka human psychology; you can hear voices coming to you, clamouring for your attention, shouting at you, or seducing you from down the ages…or you can simply ignore all that and listen to its beautiful music.
Claire.
What a wonderful comment!
Thank you each –
Ara, I agree “Yes, it is the whole that matters but I doubt that I would have really understood Chaucer or Shakespeare and etc, without some sort of guidance. It added to the enjoyment, in my case.”
But I also see Boadicea’s point, “It would have been far better had I seen a Shakespeare play before it was chopped into little pieces. Somehow, class reading of plays and poetry do not do the beauty of the language justice!” and your too much too soon point : it would certainly put a 14 year old off.
Claire
Great comment! I guess I’m one of those who prefer to listen to the ‘beautiful music’ – I feel the same way about musical music, too. No matter how hard I try, I can’t distinguish one instrument from another – just get caught up in the ‘whole’.
Takes all sorts 🙂
Pseu
I was only one of about three out of seventy who opted out of Eng, Lit. at that time. Maybe we were the only three who felt sufficiently ‘put off’ to complain – and that is probably right – since we were a pretty outspoken bunch! We were required to attend the lessons, but we made such a nuisance of ourselves on the grounds that we didn’t have to attend Greek lessons if we weren’t taking the subject that we were asked to leave.
It’s a bit of a shame since I think I probably missed out.
Yes, thank you, Claire.
Thank you…I am currently waxing lyrical about the virtues of English on a job application form. I might put it in now.
I have always found Shakespeare to be the most ‘musical’, or lyrical of the whole lot. You can just listen without understanding a word, and still be blown away by the beauty of the thing.
We once had this discussion at uni about how close to music literature actually was. I think it is close; they could be sisters, but literature is still rooted firmly in our conscious, thinking minds, whereas music speaks on a more intuitive, emotive level. I love literature, but as ever, I am with EM Forster who once said music was the highest of all the art forms.
No probs Pseu. Lovely post; I sometimes wish I lived your life when you write things like this 😉
Whilst I think that to study the history, politics and literature contextually is totally valid;
to attempt to superimpose twenty first century ethics, or lack of, and ideologies is meretricious in the extreme.
To attempt to extrapolate one media to another is specious.
I give you an example- Handel’s Water Music, a jolly, triumphal piece written in 1717, contemporary with the Stanhope Govt with Walpole’s corrupt machinations from the wings, definitely NOT triumphant; amply illustrated by Defoe’s satires, Robinson Crusoe 1719 and Gulliver’s Travels 1726. This also coincides with the peak of the rococco art period and the South Sea Bubble in 1720!
I think that the only conclusion you may draw from that is that the written form of Defoe was the only one to reflect the times in which it was written, very little else can be said.
Clare hits the nail on the head, that our contemporaries play out their own ideological fantasies, they may do so without fear of contradiction because most of their audience is ill read, ill educated in the classical sense and not qualified to judge bullshit when they hear it.
Read for your own enjoyment and judgement not with echoes and prequalifiers in your ears. One of the most useful learning curves is to read other literature written within the same period, then you get a feel for what is going on. Too many of today’s students read the set list only and never read around their subject, of course, they don’t have to, any idiot who can write a couple of paragraphs gets given a 2:2, more like confetti!
Morning Pseu, what a nice read, thanks.
£8 for a ‘rapid’ (quickie? ;)) I’d have popped into my local for a beer, a stick of biltong and got change from £2 !
Wll, we live in different places, Soutie and this was a nice treat -something I never do! And a quickie just sometimes really hits the spot. 🙂
Gee!
Very well written, Pseu. I enjoyed it 🙂
Brilliant Pseu, you just get better, one of the best I have read in a long time. I liked the ‘grey graphite smudges’ in particular.
Re the Prof, there was something about the trimmed version that I recognised, it’s just come to me, it was on a poster I saw in Washington recently, the FBI’s ten most wanted.
OMG: mwah!