NOTE: after the events of last week, I’ve been taking a short break from society/community writing. Look for Part II of my Ideology series later this week. To tide you over, here’s a little tidbit on one of my favorite 20th century poets, with a poem for good measure.
Why is it preferable for these words to be spoken, for this language to be invoked, than for there to be silence?
This is the question at the heart of Geoffrey Hill’s essay, Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”?. I love this question because it fights on so many fronts: ontology, politics, art, theology. It differentiates between being and non-being. It probes the role of speech in the polis. It explores negative and positive spaces. And it gets at the double nature of God, Who is both Sound and Silence.
I’ll start with that last point, as I think that is where Hill would start.
God’s words bring all things into existence. His silence grants everything its own unique being; God’s silence is our free will. His silence makes the space for our sound.
Poetry exists at the thin space between the divinity that asserts its being and the divinity that refrains from that assertion. Therefore, all poetry must be able to defend itself against this question.
Poetry as sound is next door to the poetry as “menace”/”atonement” of the essay title. Deliberate sound, especially language, has content. It communicates meaning. And wherever there is meaning, there is the possibility of good and evil. Our sound, made in the stillness God chooses to leave open for us, has echoes in eternity.
Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016, click on the link for a terrific author photo) is a poet tortured by his own echoes. His work is all barbed—some poems, particularly the earlier work, are exquisitely meticulous as a poisoned ring, and others are as dangerous as a battle spear, unwieldy and deadly to the novice who approaches them. Poetry, Hill writes, is in an unusual situation among the arts in relation to its medium. In material arts, like sculpture, the medium (stone, clay, bronze, etc.) interacts with the form (a person, an animal, etc.), but ultimately give way to the form. (Whether this remains true in highly abstract visual art would be a fascinating discussion, but my instinct is that Hill would assert “yes”). But the arts of language, and especially poetry, are in constant struggle with their double medium. The poem consists of the words that make it up (sound), of the conspicuous lack of words (silence), and nothing else. Whereas the sculpture can, through shapes, invoke forms separate from the medium, poetry’s form and medium are identical. Poetry, like God, expresses and constrains itself through itself.
Hill’s question in the title of the essay is a question about poetry, but also about language and ultimately, about free will. Is the language of a poem its menace, its constraint and limitation, or is it the means of its atonement? Do the words we speak—and don’t speak—save us or condemn us?
Hill finds the true threat of language in carelessness, not simply artistic carelessness but moral carelessness. He links this carelessness with a sloppy reliance on “inspiration”: the belief that one’s ideas or feelings are somehow so pure that they can be translated directly into poetic or moral action without the disciplined, technical care that true art requires. This is poetry’s menace: that in the thrill of being able to make sound, we become enamored of the sound itself and do not do the hard work of balancing it with silence.
There is a clear political application to this, as well as an artistic one: sound, creativity, production, expression, these are not ultimate values. If in our clamor for expression we do not venerate silence as well, our expression can become menacing.
Hill quotes Yeats saying that poetic perfection—the ideal balance of sound and silence—is when the language of a poem “comes right with a click like a closing box.” It’s not the spontaneous and irreducible creative ‘inspiration’, though that’s important. The moment of perfection comes after much skillful work—work that depends not simply on linguistic or artistic virtue, but on moral virtue.
The menace of poetry is its power. Even without perfection, a poem can be fierce and stirring; it can sweep us up into its sounds and, for a time at least, drown out the quieter voices of prudence.
So now we come to Hill’s idea of atonement through poetry. He uses the word ‘atonement’ in its etymologically exact sense of ‘at-one-ment’: the bringing into concord of things that were previously unreconciled. I think of the shimmering discord of an orchestra tuning, and the moment at the end where the instruments slide into tune and then settle into silence, a silence from which the music will be born.
The task of the poet—of the artist—is to bring into one-ness the spontaneity of inspiration and the deliberateness of technique. When fierceness of imagination, shown in vivid and inspired language, comes together in harmony with the “overall shape” of the poem (a matter of technical deliberation), Hill says that “what is there effected is the atonement of aesthetics with rectitude of judgement”. The poet’s craft is the bringing together of inspiration and deliberation into a single piece. The work of the poet is, therefore, an act of atonement.
But before we can atone, we must repent. Atonement requires a sense that something is not right, that what should be in unity is in fact broken. Here, Hill’s particular fascination with the moral character of the poet becomes central. He does not demand that all poets be perfectly upright individuals before they ever put pen to paper. But he does argue that in order to write poetry that can approach this point of which Yeats speaks, the point where language clicks into place and where atonement is possible, the poet must have keen awareness of his own lived experience—even, and perhaps particularly, the lived experience of his own moral failings and his grief over and repentance of those failings.
Repentance is not merely saying that one should be better than one is, and then proceeding about one’s life. It is a fierce and unremitting awareness of the brokenness of things in one’s own life and soul, an awareness that leads to a desire for atonement and restoration. There is a temptation, Hill says, to write in an attempt to rectify mistakes, expunge faux pas, or atone for a social crime in lieu of grappling with sin. Poets must do both. Because both of these—anxiety based in our social situations and guilt based in our spiritual condition—are elements of reality, neither can be shunned in true poetry.
There are obvious parallels for politics and society: we don’t need to look far for examples of how an imaginative vision separated from prudence has terrible consequences. Hill advances the idea that a poet’s life, if lived “remarkably at unity with itself,” can itself be an act of atonement, and that this atoning quality of the lived life will be evident in the written words. I believe this is true, and not simply of poets. Every life is a blend of sound and silence. Every sound is a risk, a possible menace—but balanced properly with prudent, repentant silence, sounds can turn their power towards atonement. Life too is an art worked in the dual mediums of time and space—or rather, the single medium of energy. It requires inspiration, and also technique. The technique of living is virtue. Moral awareness developed and expressed through lived experience—especially the lived experience of repenting for one’s own moral failings – has make one’s work an atonement.
Choosing a Hill poem to include here was difficult. Please go to the Poetry Foundation and read many more of them, if you are so inclined, or pick up “The Triumph of Love” for a mighty challenge. Thanks to Poetry Foundation for hosting the following poem.
Ovid in the Third Reich
non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
Amores, III, xiv
I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.
I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.