Critics of Hill, prejudice
what i often find is people who tell me hill is not as good as his praise, that the ‘rhetoric of grandeur’ surrounding his work irritates them, have not properly read him. now they may be right that wilson’s blurb does him no favours. ‘alive’ (unless wilson is misquoted) makes it sound like wilson is comprehensively multilingual (hill’s better than every living russian!); ‘prose’ puts hill in competition with some weighty talents indeed. i just wish that his negative critics were better informed. i would rather in fact they had read every book of poetry and the whole ccw. matthew reynolds once complained to me about the use of ‘atemwende’ in syon, as though it were disqualifyingly recondite, without realising apparently that hill tests out various translations throughout the book as a motif, and that knowing the title is celan’s isn’t a key to the safe where hill has squirrelled away his point. (but hey, anyway, perhaps everyone should know what atemwende is, given its author is one of the geniuses of his century!) having thought a lot about the prose i think there are reasons why these critics have not read him properly, and these reasons perhaps intersect with hill’s bizarre choice of author images for his books and perhaps echo the sense in which paradise lost is a loyalty-test speech act. i won’t go into that now. i will simply remark that the most egregious consequence of this failure to read is people’s wrong ideas about hill’s politics, which can only issue from ignorance. it is true hill has become fogeyish somewhat (cf. his remarks on the internet in conversation with archbishop williams; don’t cf. the bit of comus that wilson misread), but this is easy to forgive because it is almost universal among people who’ve lived to see the world change and change around and without them, and is certainly no jenga-piece whose vanishing to refutation would topple the structure of half a century’s argument. what he is crucially not is some swivel-eyed rightwinger. (neither i think from personal experience should his christianity be an obstacle for secular readers: i am a passionate atheist and hill is for me the best writer in english alive, except all the children who will grow up to rival shakespeare and all the writers i haven’t read.) so to critics of hill, aspiring or old-hand: please: make the effort, read him through. doing so you will find plenty of things to hate. but you should find that you hate them complexly, that you don’t hate them as you expected you would.
