geoffrey hill
several things at once: and it is this ability to compound and complicate and simplify
inan instant that is one of the signs of potential greatness in a poet.
Some of the best appreciations of this kind of blankness in Wordsworth—of
being at once atabula rasafor unpremeditated impressions and unable to take in,
to make anything of, the manifold perplexities of the world—are to be found in
the writings of Charles Williams, in particularThe English Poetic Mindof 1932.^29
Williams was a poet, novelist, theologian, and historian, who worked for many
years as an editor in the London office of Oxford University Press. Editions of
Hopkins and Kierkegaard were produced under his aegis. At the beginning of the
Second World War the London office of the Press was evacuated to Oxford, where
Williams met, and was taken up by, C. S. Lewis and the ‘Inklings’. He was invited
to lecture in the wartime English School, and did so with great success.^30 Perhaps
the best short study of his work is that written for the British Council by John
Heath-Stubbs, who attended the lectures as an undergraduate.^31 Williams died in
Oxford in 1945.^32
A few months before he was killed, Keyes wrote to a correspondent interested
in his work: ‘The only living writers whom I can accept entirely are Eliot, Charles
Williams, Graves (to some extent), my great friend John Heath-Stubbs...and a
few others—very few.’^33
Although there is no doubt in my mind that Keyes at 20 was at least as good
a poet as Williams was in his mid-fifties, nonetheless it is Williams on poets and
poetry who most illuminates for me the essentials of what I want to say about Keyes.
Here are a few of Williams’s observations:
Poetry has to do all its own work; in return it has all its own authority.^34
These things [images in poetry] are not merely pictures; they have something else in them.
They awaken some sort of capacity—for motion, for separation, for solitude, for different
life.... I have wondered whether this communication is of the sense which poetry has of its
own vigil before its own approaching greatness.^35
It is surely true that the chief impulse of a poet is, not to communicate a thing to others, but
to shape a thing, to make an immortality for its own sake.^36
These three statements all appeared in print in 1932, and could have been known
to Keyes, though I do not say that they were. What matters—or so my argument
maintains—is not so much ‘accessibility’ as power. But inaccessibility does not
(^29) Charles Williams,The English Poetic Mind(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).
(^30) See Alice Mary Hadfield,Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 188–9; and Humphrey Carpenter,The Inklings(Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1979), 118–19, 148 ff., 187, 188.
(^31) Heath-Stubbs,Hindsights, 64.
(^32) See Hadfield,Charles Williams, 235; and Carpenter,Inklings, 199–200 and 203–4.
(^33) Keyes to Richard Church,? Jan. 1943, quoted in Meyer, ‘Memoir’, 122; see also Guenther,Sidney
Keyes, 153.
(^34) Williams,English Poetic Mind, 167. (^35) Ibid. 198. (^36) Ibid. 5.