Geoffrey Hill Quotes

Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

I think men and women who write poetry or write music or paint are finally responsible for what they do. They are entitled to praise for any success they achieve and they should not complain of just criticism.

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other.

The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.

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.

An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.

Shakespeare
clearly heard many voices. No secret:
voicing means hearing, at a price a gift

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

I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.

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

Thus I grind to conclusion.

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

Self-astonishment is achieved when, by some process I can't fathom, common words are moved, or move themselves, into clusters of meaning so intense that they seem to stand up from the page, three-dimensional almost.

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

In memory of those things these words were born.