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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite"

"The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,"

"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'."

"In memory of those things these words were born."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"I write to astonish myself"

"I wish I understood myself more clearly or less well."

"Shakespeare clearly heard many voices. No secret: voicing means hearing, at a price a gift"

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

"Thus I grind to conclusion."