Features April 1984
“The battle it was born to lose”: the poetry of Geoffrey Hill
On Geoffrey Hill’s style and poetry.
The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.
—Charles Péguy, in Bar-Cochebas
The tongue’s atrocities.
—Geoffrey Hill, in “History as Poetry”
When a major new work appears by one of the best poets now writing it is reason enough to command our attention. But when the work marks a significant departure in the poet’s career, it is cause for our most careful scrutiny. When Geoffrey Hill’s long poem, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,
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