One person’s word soup is another’s resonant work of genius. It was ever thus…
Geoffrey Hill, in his last book, has elements of hip hop entering in places, a man with his ears open and a nice glancing riff on the possible role of rhyme in contemporary poetry, dead since Hart Crane. A fiery radical condemnation of the contemporary world in which he even bigs up a retro-ideologue like Corbyn, which I find amusing. But great poets display their ‘negative capabilities’ on their own grounds. ‘How ill white hairs become a fool and jester’ would be nearer to my opinion. Hill was a complex man from a working class background who was obsessed with language ( he spoke several) music and art. And not a bad singer, to work in a ‘folkie’ reference: in one of his lectures (easily found) he offers a creditable and poignant version of ‘Fare Thee Well.’
Poetic difficulty? A remark he made about so called obscurity was that in the modern world, if you have internet access you can figure most things out. In any language… An example would be The Cantos of Ezra Pound which have a massive commentary online easily found… Hill was a gloriously cranky old git well-tuned in to the contemporary world and redeemed by his generosity of spirit and his poetry… Slurp…
Re McColl, some of whose work I like, Dylan was much the greater singer songwriter because he escaped the confines of the ideologues of the bourgeois left typified by the likes of good old Pete Seeger. McColl was no musician and much of his work suffered from the dreadful clunking banjo of his partner, almost a symbol of his politics. A pity because I think if he had teamed up with someone more imaginative he could have taken his work to other levels. Someone like Ruth Crawford Seeger, for example, the real musical giant in that family, sadly gone before her time.
But it’s a complex world, mes copins… hurrah for soup, wordy or otherwise… and
alternatives - the dullard Larkin’s parochial pushbike or wheels of fire…
slurp the last…