Geoffrey Hill Quotes

Thus I grind to conclusion.

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,

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.

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.

In memory of those things these words were born.

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.

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

I try to make a distinction between enjoyment and joy. You are only prepared to enjoy what you already have a taste for; wheras joy is shocking and surprising.

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

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.

The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion.

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

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

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.

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.