I’ve been mulling over Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (Counterpoint. 2000), which I rescued from a discount book shop’s bargain bin on my last trip back to the U.S., and am left wondering if it has ever been examined closely by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers proper and post, because, with its grand disjunctions, its fragments and linguistic slippages, it could very well pass for writing in the experimental style of writers X, Y, and Z in the U.S.A., and Jeremy Prynne and some members of that tradition in the U.K. And no wonder! Hill would have to have transformed himself into the Hermit of the Major Arcana to have escaped this sort of thing, situated as he is at Boston University in the very heart of L=A=N=G=P=O territory.

Though the back of the book tells us that Speech! Speech! is a jeremiad aimed at these times of debased public speech, of “media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words”–I believe that the real target of Hill’s blast is the young–especially his American students. We can almost hear the constriction rise in the throat of Hill–the purveyor of the Humanist tradition–as he finds himself perhaps wishing–secretly–to throttle the barbarians who are not only at the gate, but have entered the halls, and even taken up residence in American universities! Unlike poor Henry of the Dream Songs who has the gentle Mr. Bones to remind him of the failures of the flesh and the long slide to oblivion, we have Hill’s “Rapmaster”–a straw man if there ever was one–whom the don bewails, lectures, trounces, denounces.

Either the thing moves, Rapmaster, or it
does not. I disclaim spontaneity,
the appearance of which is power. I will
match you fake pindaric for trite
violence, evil twin…. [92]

To my ears Speech! Speech! is the moan of yet another WHITE GUY tethered by tenure, far from being DEAD yet (thank God), and lashing out with the only weapons he has at hand–wit, irony, sarcasm in several languages,–allusive squibs that fail because the target no longer feels that it must spend time learning the Western Canon, and so doesn’t understand–or even care–that it is being roundly taken to task. Hill’s language, loaded with erudition, is becoming increasingly harder for the young to understand, and therefore easier to disregard. (I can’t help but be reminded here of Blake’s nightmarish engraving of the being in the cage having its wings cut by a smiling giant–what better symbol for the poet in the halls of the academy!)

Unlike King Log and much of Hill’s muscular, early work–which I continue to admire–Speech! Speech! is Hill at his most lax and most overtly cynical. While attempting to critique debased language, he himself presents texts that lack the intensity–the intellectual interest–of his earlier work.

Go back to your roots Geoffrey Hill and bring us that luminous vision again. We are–as you above others would understand–sorely in need of it.