geoffrey hill
It cannot be stated too strongly that the pressure of expectation in the reading
public,or, rather, the force of that expectationas ventriloquized by ‘leading’ critics,
is enormous. It requires confidence in one’s own integrity of voice to withstand
what I have just referred to as contingent factors. It is one of the tragedies of
late Wordsworth and late Tennyson that in old age their individual voices became
increasingly less able to distinguish themselves from the voice of expectation. The
poetry of late Auden is manifestly the work of a thoroughly tamed poet; andAbout
the Houseis a nicely house-trained book. It is not necessarily an advantage to die
young: one knows more than one poet satisfactorily broken in by the time of her or
his first pamphlet.
Keyes, in ‘The Artist in Society’, remarks that at the turn of the nine-
teenth–twentieth centuries there were ‘two possible ways out of [the] impasse.
The artist could either secede entirely from society, and retire to a world of personal
symbols and values; or he could become a painstaking recorder of the physical
world.’^90 I take ‘impasse’ to refer to matters outlined in this and the preceding
paragraph. Douglas, at first impression, is more the painstaking recorder of the
physical world; Keyes, on first acquaintance, more engrossed in ‘a world of personal
symbols’—but this leaves us with the awkward verbs ‘retire’ and ‘secede’; and I
would strongly rebut the suggestion that Keyes is any kind of secessionist. The poet
who, for the space of a single poem, seems to hold the alternatives in exquisite
balance is Drummond Allison in ‘The Brass Horse’. With Keyes, again, it seems
more a case of taking public responsibility for one’s personal symbols:
For Milein, l.xii.41Talkstopped,andthefive-fingeredhandofsense
Crouched like a creature. Your amazing eyes
Swung inward suddenly, pulling me down
Among the debris of my broken gestures.
And there were lives perversely otherwise
Than ours, yet like; and possible
Solutions to the fearsome riddle
That ravished my mind’s country. There was Chartres
Reeling with insult; my own vanity
Of clockwork bird and painted loneliness
Rubble upon that place, rabble upon
The guarded stairs of your mind’s secret place.
And there were pictured rivers unexplored
By us; and unmapped forests we could tame
With my hard hand and your bright eyes to guide it.
There were the foundling hours now wandering
Homeless and eager for our saving friendship.
There was a lake, Mozart beside a lake(^90) Keyes, ‘Artist in Society’, 142–3.