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PARTISAN REVIEW
guage and "the specific gravity of human nature."
Language, for Hill, can effect its own laws of gravity: it "gravitates
and exerts a gravitational pull." These thoughts on the weight and drag
of poetic language certainly have to do with matters of prosody, but I
want to focus here on another form of density in poetry. The upright,
compact, vertical posture of a word or phrase may be as often semantic.
Suzanne Langer writes:
The tension which music achieves through dissonance, and the reori–
entation in each new resolution to harmony, find their equivalents in
the suspensions and periodic decisions of propositional sense in po–
etry. Literal sense, not euphony, is the "harmonic structure" of poetry.
Hill found expression for an idea quite similar to this in a letter by
W. B. Yeats:
When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second-hand - there
is no difficulty to force you down under the surface - difficulty is our
plow.
The language achieves its weight by resisting the reader's unbur–
dened passage through the poem. Consider those scenes where Hill bal–
ances delicately on a single landscape Pcguy's real and imagined fields of
battle: each line is packed hard with nuance and ambiguity, weighing
upon others; each word shoulders its belongings of etymology and his–
tory; each must be removed, scrutinized, and reconceived in relation to
other words and phrases around it. Speech is, Hill argues, "a matter of ..
. usage perching and hatching on the surface of language." Each word
and phrase makes its own
impression
on that surface. And yet this
deepening, this gravitational drag of the language's semantic weight is
not an uncomplicated 'pulsion' that completes itself in that action. Of
Pcguy, Hill declared: "Dying, your whole life/ fell into place," down
"into the darkness of resurrection." So too, might not the dense
impression of Hill's ponderous language represent an attempt to push
free of the body of its own locution? The concept of achieved density as
a method of liberation is common in his criticism. He recalls , for
instance, John Crowe Ransom's remark that "the author of 'a good
poem' is in its making freed from his juridical or prose self," and in a
reading of Wordsworth's "The Female Vagrant," he speaks of a
"collateral weight of technical concentration" and of "the drag of the
