Geoffrey Hill Quotes

I have learned one thing: not to look down
Too much upon the damned.

I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.

Charles Péguy, stubborn rancours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences of the 20th century.I offer my poem as my homage to the triumph of his 'defeat'.

Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

Thus I grind to conclusion.

The years will not
answer for what they have done, that much is
certain. There is no shaking them, we
might have foreseen this but refused.

I contrast hierarchy with hegemony , the juxtaposition of the real & surreal

Or say it is Pentecost: the hawthorn-tree,
set with coagulate magnified flowers of may,
blooms in a haze of light; old chalk-pits brim
with seminal verdue from the roots of time. Landscape is like revelation; it is both
singular crystal and the remotest things.
Cloud-shadows of seasons revisit the earth,
odourless myrrh bourne by the wandering kings.

I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.

In memory of those things these words were born.

It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.

"One cannot lose what one has not possessed."
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.

To say a poet is to be condemned or inaccessible because she invokes some fields of vision which we have difficulty in grasping; this seems to me a crass kind of bullying.

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull
of a half-eaten ram; vicious wounds in earth
opening. What seraphs are afoot.

I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.