Geoffrey Hill Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

"One cannot lose what one has not possessed."
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lost what I want. I want you.

Geoffrey Hill
Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.

Geoffrey Hill
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

Geoffrey Hill
Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone

Geoffrey Hill
Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them.

Geoffrey Hill
Self-astonishment is achieved when, by some process I can't fathom, common words are moved, or move themselves, into clusters of meaning so intense that they seem to stand up from the page, three-dimensional almost.

Geoffrey Hill
The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.

Geoffrey Hill
I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.

Geoffrey Hill
Or say it is Pentecost: the hawthorn-tree,
set with coagulate magnified flowers of may,
blooms in a haze of light; old chalk-pits brim
with seminal verdue from the roots of time.

Landscape is like revelation; it is both
singular crystal and the remotest things.
Cloud-shadows of seasons revisit the earth,
odourless myrrh bourne by the wandering kings.

Geoffrey Hill
I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.

Geoffrey Hill
By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

Geoffrey Hill
It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.

Geoffrey Hill
The years will not
answer for what they have done, that much is
certain. There is no shaking them, we
might have foreseen this but refused.

Geoffrey Hill
The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion.

Geoffrey Hill
Charles Péguy, stubborn rancours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences of the 20th century. I offer my poem as my homage to the triumph of his 'defeat'.

Geoffrey Hill
Shakespeare
clearly heard may voices. No secret:
voicing means hearing, at a price a gift

Geoffrey Hill
Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead
Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam.

Geoffrey Hill
I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.

Geoffrey Hill
I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.

Geoffrey Hill
I contrast hierarchy with hegemony, the juxtaposition of the real & surreal

Geoffrey Hill
What are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Geoffrey Hill
Primroses; salutations; the miry skull
of a half-eaten ram; vicious wonds in earth
opening. What seraphs are afoot.

Geoffrey Hill
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other.

Geoffrey Hill
I try to make a distinction between enjoyment and joy. You are only prepared to enjoy what you already have a taste for; wheras joy is shocking and surprising.

Geoffrey Hill
An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.

Geoffrey Hill
I have learned one thing: not to look down
Too much upon the damned.

Geoffrey Hill
I think men and women who write poetry or write music or paint are finally responsible for what they do. They are entitled to praise for any success they achieve and they should not complain of just criticism.

Geoffrey Hill
To say a poet is to be condemned or inaccessible because she invokes some fields of vision which we have difficulty in grasping; this seems to me a crass kind of bullying.

Geoffrey Hill
She kept the siege. And every day
We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle's breath.
Damp curtains glued against the pane
Sealed time away. Her body froze
As if to freeze us all, and chain
Creation to a stunned repose.

Geoffrey Hill
For this creating to take place (as it does from time to time) words have to be accepted as heirs of their forebears, as we are of ours. And in each case, what exists is often only a bankrupt inheritance; or the hinterlands of the unspoken.

Geoffrey Hill