BOOKS
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juxtaposing the surprisingly congenial "energies" of Pound and of
Hobbes' contemporary, the poet and playwright John Dryden, that in its
grasp of the complex machinery of equivocation is fully equal to the
work of the great twentieth-century expositor of ambiguity and drift,
the English critic and poet William Empson: not least in the extent to
which Hill, like Empson, insists that poetry cannot be divorced from
policy and from the "compacted doctrines" that, as Empson argues, are
necessarily imposed by poems on their readers. Against Francis Bacon's
claim that "Policie" is, in Hill's paraphrase, "the most 'immersed' of
crafts or 'knowledges' ," Hill offers "meta-poetry" such as Dryden's and
Pound's - or his own and Empson's - which is "immersed in the
knowledge that it is so immersed," "infused," that is, by the "practice of
an uncommon alertness to the common practices of speech."
This alertness takes the form of what Hill once called, citing Blake,
"the struggles of entanglement with incoherent roots," a lack of fit not
only between word origins and established usage but within etymologies
as well. The grammatical and syntactical aspects of such entanglement
also come into play, since it is only by remaining alert to half-buried
semantic incoherence that disentanglement, whether grammatical or
syntactical, becomes possible. Almost twenty-five years ago Hill drew on
Cardinal Newman and Simone Wei! in order to distinguish "a grammar
of assent" - "involving a reciprocity between imagination and action" -
from the syntax which enables a passage to function simultaneously on
several planes; these represent, he argues, alternative forms of "objective
.. . [self-] scrutiny."
If
in his own poetry Hill aspires to "a grammar that transfigure[s]
syntax," he still leaves open "the way of syntax" should the grammar
prove unavailable, unavailing. With regard to subject-matter, however,
syntax's transfigurement - the extent to which imagination may justly be
said to " 'lead on' to action" and, reciprocally, be " 'enriched and
deepened' by [the] grasp of right action" - has always been his dominant
theme.
Here, as an index of Hill's dexterous handling of the theme, is a
cento of lines:
There is no bloodless myth will hold;
I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir;
