1Geoffrey Hill has devoted considerable attention to Pound in his critical prose. This is in part because his own work continues in the modernist tradition and is influenced by Pound’s poetry, as Hill’s choice to publish several long poems in Agenda suggests. Hill’s prose work on Pound seems to occur primarily in the decade between 1977 and 1987, but his familiarity with Pound certainly predates that period. Hill became a close friend of Donald Hall in Oxford in 1952 (The Paris Review 291), and must have read Hall’s Rome 1960 Pound interview with considerable interest. I don’t suppose any young poet writing in the 1950s could ignore the fate of Ezra Pound.

2The opening of Hill’s 1977 essay “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’” contains a quotation from Pound’s letters destined to become recurrent in Hill’s prose: “The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of the surface is in accord with the root in justice” (The Lords of Limit 3). This little phrase is alluded to again and again by Hill: in his 1981 interview with John Haffenden (Viewpoints 99), twice in the 1983 essay “Our Word is Our Bond” (The Lords of Limit 143, 155) and in the 1986 Clark Lectures (The Enemy’s Country 100).

3A closer look at the 1983 essay “Our Word Is Our Bond” is perhaps the best way to situate the debt Hill owes Pound as well as his desire to build on his work. In this essay Hill suggests that, “The language a writer uses and the writer who uses the language are inextricably involved and implicated.” (The Lords of Limit 153). Ezra Pound and John Austin are the crucial figures as Hill argues for a poetry that can both say and do. Pound serves as an example of the -danger inherent to making poetry of action: “…in Pound’s humiliation we have an exemplary instance of ‘idea’ brought face to face with ‘the particular truth of things’” (154). Pound’s error was inexactitude, as Hill sees it, even in his “unbalanced” confessional remorse, Pound had said, “I guess I was off base all along” (155). Hill thinks Pound should have followed his own dictum about how poets should work:

Since Pound places such emphasis upon definition (“The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice”) it is not unjust to take him up precisely on this point, on this disjunction of the aesthetic and the ethical. (155)

4With praise, Hill quotes Kenneth Burke’s description of “workmanship,” later linked to Pound’s notion of “irreproachable skill” (158) as “a trait in which the ethical and the esthetic are one” (150). Such an ideal is to be carried out where, according to John Crowe Ransom, “the density or connotativeness of poetic language reflects the world’s density” (151). Yet the crux of the -argument turns on another quotation by Pound: “All values ultimately come from our judicial sentences” (153-54). This was modified by Christopher Ricks to read, “all values ultimately go into our judicial sentences” (155). The difference is considerable. On March 7, 2000, in the second Tanner lecture delivered in Oxford, Hill classified as “symbolist, or one might say, Romantic” Pound’s “belief in the absolute authority of poetics—‘all values ultimately come from our (i.e. the poets’) judicial sententces’”. This distinction already formed a backdrop to “Our Word is Our Bond”: “…it is lack of attention, or ‘care’ which brings Pound to the point of ‘signing on the dotted line’ for the rulers of the darkness of this world…” (155).

5The essay “Our Word is Our Bond” ends with a twist, by quoting the transcript of Pound’s Washington hearing which reads: “the crime with which he is charged is closely tied up with his profession of writing.” So Pound’s sentence definitively disproves the essay’s epigraph from Austin’s Philosophical Papers (1961), which denies that speech acts exist in literature. Pound was judged for his word, his bond, and the irony is that he who confused judicial sentences with legislative, executive acts, could receive in return, as Hill puts it, “executive acts presuming to be true verdictives” the likes of which could declare him to be “an incompetent person” (159). Pound got his deserts, his word literally became his bond, but the essay ends with another judicial quotation from Pound’s letters which situates him as an authority of the poetic craft: “And when one has the mot juste, one is finished with the subject” (159). But Hill was not finished with this subject. Pound has continued to be a key touchstone in his critical essays, as a glance at the index to The Enemy’s Country will attest. “Dividing Legacies” (1996), which is severely critical of Eliot’s Four Quartets, doesn’t mention Pound directly, but has a strong undercurrent which points to him:

The residual beneficiaries of Four Quartets have been Larkin and Anglican literary “spirituality,” two seeming incompatibles fostered by a common species of torpor which Eliot had acutely diagnosed in 1920. (24)

6The Waste Land, though, is tough poetry, like Pound’s, and as such, receives Hill’s approbation: “The Waste Land, at its first appearance, could only be understood exegetically; that is its remaining strength” (28). Clearly, Hill feels closer to Pound than to the later Eliot, of whom he writes, “Eliot’s poetry declines over thirty years from pitch into tone…” (22). Eliot had written to John Quinn about Pound on March 4, 1918, “You see I value his verse far higher than that of any other living poet” (Eliot 223). Pound as editor was undoubtedly partly responsible for the pitch of The Waste Land, and Pound once again had a hand in the work. When the original manuscript was published in 1971, edited by Valerie Eliot, he signed the preface (vii).

Ezra’s toolbox

“…probably no one writing serious verse since the First World War has not undergone the influence of this technician in a manner which has essentially affected his performance. It is not likely to be forgotten that Eliot addressed him as il miglior fabbro…”

—C.H. Sisson (1971)

“Pound has provided a box of tools, as abundant for this generation as those Spenser provided for the Elizabethans, and a man who is not influenced by Pound in this sense of trying to use at least some of those tools, is simply not living in his own century.”

—Basil Bunting (1975)

7The question is: which tools has Hill been using? After reading “Our Word as Our Bond,” one can see that Hill, like Pound, feels strongly, as Marjorie Perloff phrased it, “that poetry matters, that it is important, that if ‘a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays’” (Perloff 198). In terms of the three areas of Pound’s legacy that Perloff distinguishes, the quest for “le mot juste” has been a longtime concern of Hill’s, to the point of perfected polysemia and verticality in his choice of words. Hill has been influenced by free verse as Pound and William Carlos Williams have used it (this appears to be the case for a number of poems in Canaan, especially “Cycle”). Perloff quotes Jerome Rothenberg on Pound’s “pivotal breakthrough in translation” and Robert Lowell’s “translation-as-invention.” These phrases have a correspondence to the title of the Hill conference held in Warwick in May 2001, “Tradi-tion and Translation,” where Geoffrey Hill spoke about “Writing into the Lan- guage.” How could Hill’s own translation poems not be related to Pound’s? Just as Pound could feel free to cut a stanza from a poem he translated, Hill’s rendition of Celan, in “Two Chorale-Preludes” in Tenebrae (1978), aims at getting the essential kernel of meaning across (Collected 165-66). Pound had projected a Ph.D. thesis on Lope de Vega, but he abandoned the project after failing a course in the history of literary criticism. Is it mere coincidence that the last poem of the Lachrimae sequence in Tenebrae, “Lachrimae Amantis,” is “a free translation of a sonnet by Lope de Vega” as Hill acknowledges (Collected 204)?

8Avril Horner’s 1993 essay about Hill and Pound focused on touch points of comparison that were already visible in Hill’s work: not giving in to the expecta-tions of one’s readers, the presence of morality in the poetry, and a historical perspective on the present. To this can be added multiple voicing, which Allen Tate identified as the conversation quality of the Cantos (258). Another very distinguishing characteristic of Hill’s poetry, its solid referentiality, comes straight from Pound. “Good art begins with an escape from dullness,” pontificated Pound. Escaping dullness meant writing reality. In Guide to Kulchur (1938) he explained:

I mean to say the purpose of the writing is to reveal the subject. The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register. (51)

9In The Short Oxford History of English Literature (1994), Andrew Sanders defined Pound’s poetry as “a highly complex referential poetry” (526). Donald Davie suggested to what extent this was true in a 1972 essay on a “pedestrian reading” of the Cantos:

I would insist on this: the first requirement for a study of Pound is a set of maps (preferably 1/2” to the mile) of at any rate certain regions of France, Italy and England; the second requirement is a set of Michelin Green Guides for France, Italy, and (if one is American) similar guides to the South of England. In this, the case of Pound is no different from other writers, or it is different only in degree. (The Poet in the Imaginary Museum 239)

10In degree, Pound more than other modernists based his poems on reality. Davie perceived that Pound, more than Eliot or Yeats, wanted his poetic -reality to be not simply linguistic but also mimetic. He wanted literal truths to come through in the poem, including truths of geography and topography. The pedagogical functions of the referential poetic text also inspire Geoffrey Hill. Eliot had discovered the appeal of referentiality in Laforgue’s poetry, but he never claimed to use it in his own poetry so as to influence the reader, whereas this is the case for Pound (and Hill). According to Davie:

T. S. Eliot insisted time and again that The Waste Land was not a directive to the reader to feel thus and thus about the twentieth century. (Pound’s Cantos in large part was; but Pound broke the other half of the rhetorical artist’s contract by insisting that the feeling “drive through to action”.) (The Poet in the Imaginary Museum 245)

Some poets can deal perfectly happily and competently with the poem as an anecdote, where language has a deft, satisfactory, empirical function, inoffensively conveying the gist of an interesting experience. My limitation as a poet, one might say, is a deficient sense of the anecdotal: I am much less excited by anecdote and narrative than I am by the resonances of words. The poet’s true commitment must always be first to the vertical richness of language. The poet’s gift is to make history and politics and religion speak for themselves through the strata of language. (“Under Judgement” 214)

12By the time he wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), Hill was putting into practice Pound’s notion of ideas which act as explained in Guide to Kulchur (1938):

At this point we must make a clean cut between two kinds of “ideas.” Ideas which exist and/or are discussed in a species of vacuum, which are as it were toys of the intellect, and ideas which are intended to “go into action,” or to guide action and serve us as rules (and/or measures) of conduct. (34)

13One might postulate that The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy is also intended as a way of correcting Pound, of bringing “atonement.” Corroborat-ing this idea is the plethora of comments on Pound by Hill during the years preceding the poem’s publication. Also of interest is the way the first French commentator of the poem expresses the relationship between ethics and esthetics for Hill’s depiction of Péguy. One could almost read the description as applicable to Pound:

• 2 But see Merle Brown, who suggested that Mercian Hymns XIV has the Pisan Cantos asai antagonist (Dou (...)

Éthique et esthétique se rejoignent chez Péguy parce que la quête de la justesse poétique est inséparable pour lui de la quête de la justice ; il faut à la fois justesse et justice pour rendre le mot juste.2 (Leray 70)

• 3 I have tried to examine the visual elements of the poem in a paper given at "SeeingThings," a confe (...)

Jeffrey Wainwright used two quotations from the essay “Our Word is Our Bond” (published the same year as the Péguy poem) to say the same thing: “Hill has done his Péguy justice: ‘the ethical and the esthetic are one’; his great poem is ‘a bit of real matter lodged in the body politic’” (Wainwright 111). The collage method of The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy owes a considerable amount to Pound, and especially to his Gaudier-Brzeska, A Memoir by Ezra Pound (1916), though in Hill’s poem the visual is uniquely verbal.3

Pound as persona in the triumph of love and speech! speech!

14The Triumph of Love (1998) and Speech! Speech! (2000) are new forms in the Geoffrey Hill poetry corpus. It is Pound who seems central to a proper understanding of these two volumes. Reviewers of The Triumph of Love have dismissed the ever-present old man persona as excessive and a hindrance to reading enjoyment. What they failed to notice was the fusion of the Hill persona with Pound in the old man passages, even though in The New Criterion, William Logan went so far as to negatively compare Speech! Speech! to “the madhouse ravings of Ezra Pound.” The conflation between Pound and the Hill persona is inferred in the slight differences between sections V and CXLIX. In the first version, there seems to be a clear indication of Pound:

Obstinate old man—senex
sapiens, it is not. What is he saying;
why is he still so angry? He says, I cannot
forgive myself. We are immortal.
where was I? Prick him. (2)

Obstinate old man—senex
sapiens, it is not. Is he still
writing? What is he writing now? He
has just written: I find it hard
to forgive myself. We are immortal.
Where was I?—(82)

16Writing about Mercian Hymns (1971), Michael North noticed Hill’s self-implication and related that to doing things with language:

Hill’s ultimate contention in “Our Word Is Our Bond” is that literary work that is highly conscious of the opacity and difficulty of language is more purely performative than language that assumes an artificial freedom from conflict. In this sense the ultimate speech act would be the confession of complicity, the confes-sion of one’s own inextricable involvement in the context of the language used. (465)

LXXII

Ethics at the far edge: give the old
bugger a shove/gentleman a shout.

LXXIII

I may be gone some time. Hallelujah!
Confession and recantation in fridge. (38)

19If indeed there is a reply here, it would seem that Hill’s finesse is exquisite. (The slash, by the way, is a new bit of punctuation to Hill’s poetry, and seems lifted out of The Cantos). In section LXXII, whose ethics are on the edge? Pound’s of course, but also the ethics of those who confine him (his cage was after all customized so as to keep light out, and he alone of the caged -prisoners was not taken out for exercise). Elsewhere in The Triumph of Love one reads, “The open secret is to act well” (LXXVIII 41). The reader is given such a choice here: shove him over the edge, or call him back from the edge. There is -similar ambiguity in section LXXIV, which seems to correspond to the first Pisan canto:

LXXIV

For Cinna the Poet, see under errata. (38)

20The errata resonate as both Pound’s and his captor’s. It is an astutely profound way of criticizing his being placed in a cage at Pisa. But the notion of error (which goes so far as to include evil) resonates throughout the entire poem, and every poet shares the plight of errata in one way or another, as the intrusive editor (ED) of The Triumph of Love constantly reminds the reader (Pound has such an editor in “Canto XCVII”). Error is inevitable. “Cinna the Poet” is Pound, like the poet who was killed in error because the crowd thought he was responsible for Caesar’s murder in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Pound was not killed, but caged, judged and sentenced. The question asked in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’s first section applies: “Must men stand by what they write…?”

21There may be yet more behind the little word “errata” which is in italics in Hill’s poem. In George Steiner’s autobiographical Errata: An Examined Life (1997) there are at least four allusions to Pound, one being Steiner’s luck at finding a copy “of the original publication of Pound’s first Canto, the Circe Canto in mint condition,” which he purchased (Errata 16). Not only does Steiner demonstrate interest in Pound’s talent, he relates a story which reads as a comedy of error. He describes his brief involvement in a dispute between Allen Tate and Karl Shapiro (127-8). T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate were part of the jury that awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry to Ezra Pound for the Pisan Cantos. The judges were accused of anti-Semitism, and Tate, his professor at the University of Chicago, summoned Steiner to ask if a Jew could accept a challenge to a duel, as he wished to propose a duel to Shapiro.

22Before this paper draws to a close, perhaps Pound’s importance for 20^th-century poetry needs to be restated. Michael A. Bernstein in The Tale of the Tribe (1980) argued that with the Cantos, Pound was trying to challenge the novel’s dominance “as the genre that could engage political, economic, historical, and social realities” (Perloff 211). Pound succeeded, but with error in his -evaluation of those realities, as Hill suggests in section CXLVI of The Triumph of Love where Pound is at last named, in a context which alludes to anti-Semitism:

• 8 In the first Tanner lecture Hill remarked, "Pound... to a significant extent, derived his aesthetic (...)

Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s mark:
Mosaic statute to which Ruskin was steadfast.
(If Pound had stood so, he might not have foundered.) (80)‑8

23Hill has not tried to remove Pound’s mark. Rather he has salvaged the craftsman. Like Pound’s, his poetry aims at engaging with political, economic, historical, and social realities. To sum up, in The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill has sought “the root in justice” of the poetic craft, and he has also expressed the rude injustice Pound the poet suffered.

XXXVII

Shameless old man, bent on committing

more public nuisance. Incontinent

fury wetting the air. Impotently

bereft satire. Charged with erudition,

put up by the defence to be

his own accuser. (19)