Geoffrey Hill Quotes

Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

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

In memory of those things these words were born.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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

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.

I write
to astonish myself

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

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

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 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.

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,