Geoffrey Hill Quotes (27 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Geoffrey Hill: 27 quotes 1 like

Famous Geoffrey Hill Quotes

“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

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

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

Geoffrey Hill

"A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook" 1-3, Tenebrae.
Poetry

“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

Notes on The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, in Collected Poems Penguin Books 1985
Poetry

“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

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

“September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.”

Geoffrey Hill

September Song http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/september-song/.
Poetry

“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

Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013

Geoffrey Hill Quotes about time

“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

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

“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

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy 5.21-29.
Poetry

“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

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Geoffrey Hill Quotes

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

Geoffrey Hill

"The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz" II. King Log.
Poetry

“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

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

People , Art , Democracy , Thinking

“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

Integer Vitae http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/188/2#/20607403/0
Poetry

“I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.”

Geoffrey Hill

The Orchards of Syon II.17-18.
Poetry

“Thus I grind to conclusion.”

Geoffrey Hill

from The Daybooks.
Poetry

“Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite”

Geoffrey Hill

Poetry

“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

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

Intelligence , Thinking , Sense , Wedding

“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

Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013

“In memory of those things these words were born.”

Geoffrey Hill

Author note to his Collected Poems 1985.
Poetry

Memory

“I write
to astonish myself”

Geoffrey Hill

The Orchards of Syon XXIII.20-21.
Poetry

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

Geoffrey Hill

The Orchards of Syon II.4-6.
Poetry

Secret

“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

Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013

Joy

“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

Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill

Idea , Falseness

“I contrast hierarchy with hegemony, the juxtaposition of the real & surreal”

Geoffrey Hill

Interview with Sameer Rahim, 'Poetry as History', Telegraph Review, 14 December 2013.
Interview, Telegraph Review, 2013

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

Geoffrey Hill

Ovid in the Third Reich
Poetry

Learning

“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

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Beauty , Hope , Fraud

“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

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

“The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy”

Geoffrey Hill

Poetry

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