non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
(Amores, III.xiv)
She who can deny having sinned does not sin, and only the fault confessed makes her notorious.
(Thanks to Professor Rand Johnson.)
On a shopping trip to Birmingham, when I was about fifteen, my father bought
me Oscar Williams's Little Treasure of Modem Verse together with the
Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, and I carried the Williams
antholgoy in my jacket pocket all over Worcestershire for several years until it
disintegrated: I think there was probably a time when I knew every poem
in that anthology by heart. . . .
[Q] Do you have strong feelings about the function of art and poetry, or do you
feel that when we look to art for consolation, sublimation or transcendence we
should remain sceptical about its value?
[A] What is wrong with accepting both parts of that proposition? To succeed
totally in finding consolation in art would be to enter a prelapsarian kingdom.
Father Chirstopher Devlin has a very fine phrase to define the themes of
Hopkins's sermons -- "the lost kingdom of innocence and original justice", which
is a lovely resonant phrase; and without in any way aligning myself
hubristically with Hopkins, I would want to avail myself of Devlin's phrase,
because I think there's a real sense in which every fine and moving poem bears
witness to this lost kingdom of innocence and original justice. In handling the
English language the poet makes an act of recognition that etymology is
history. The history of the creation and the debasement of words is a paradigm
of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and orignal justice.
If we can accept that image to any degree, then it seems to me that we can
simultaneously accept the genuine possibility of consolation. After all,
scepticism is a totally different thing from cycnicism. A society which
provides such solid rewards for the vacuousness of the television personality
is so centrally and orthodoxly cynical that scepticism belongs iwth poetry as a
kind of marginal resistance to it. Therfore the oxymoronic nature of our world
produces a resistant paradox, which is that the poem, which in itself may not
contain a grain of scepticism, may nonetheless belong with certain kinds of
constructive scepticism as one of the instruments of resistance to the drift of
the age. ***
[Q] Can you describe how and why you came to write Mercian Hymns,
and why you
chose to write the sequence in the form of prose poems?
[A] They're versets of rhythmical prose. The rhythm and cadence are far
more of a pitched and tuned chant that I think one normally associates with
the prose poem. I designed the appearance of the page in the form of versets.
The reason they take the form they do is because at a very early stage the words
and phrases begain to group themselves in this way. I did immediately see it
as an extended sequence, and it did come quite quickly for me -- in three years,
which is rapid by my standards. My second book, King Log, was nine years in
the making.
[Q] I'd like to quote the panegyric Harold Bloom wrote . . . "Mercian
Hymns,
despite the limpidity of its individual sections, is the subtlest and most
oblique of his works. It is not only hard to hold together, but there is some
question as to what it is 'about", though the necessary answer is akin to The
Prelude again: Hill has at last no subject but his own complex subjectivity,
and so the poem is 'about' himself, which turns out to be an exchange of gifts
with the 'Muse of History'." Are those the terms in which you see the work?
[A] I think it is less solipsistic than that description
suggests. I was not merely interested in the phenomenon of my own sensibility,
I was genuinely interested in the phenomenon of King Offa and of the rise and
fall of the Kingdom of Mercia. My feeling for Offa and Mercia can scarcely be
disentagnled from my mixed feelings for my own home country of Worcestershire.
Since Offa seems to have been on the whole a rather hateful man who nonetheless
created forms of government and coinage which compel one's admiration, this
image of a tyrannical creator of order and beauty is, if you like, an objective
correlative for the inevitable feelings of love and hate which any man or woman
must feel for the patria. The murderous brutality of Offa as a political
animal seems again an objective correlative for the ambiguities of English
history in general, as a means of trying to encompass and accommodate the early
humiliations and fears of one's own childhood and also one's discovery of the
tyrannical streak in oneself as a child. here again one is speaking of those
characteristics which one holds in common with one's fellow beings.
Some bibliographical references for further exploration: