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  • True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound
  • Natalie Pollard
True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound. Christopher Ricks. Yale: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 272. $28.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

Poets have often commented on the vexed nature of literary friendship. "Difficult friend, I would have preferred / You to them," Geoffrey Hill writes, in his valediction to Osip Mandelstam.1 Difficulty and enmity, preference and alliance are at the forefront of Christopher Ricks' latest monograph on twentieth-century lyric relations. True Friendship takes as its focus not pleasant literary accord but generative sparring between distinguished poetical antagonists. Ricks' book deftly showcases three case studies of difficult literary alliances between modernist poets and their late-twentieth-century descendents: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell.

"In any […] friendship, there is competition, yes;" Ricks reminds us: "ruthless competition, no" (151). For Ricks, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of voicing dissent from one's forebears. Much of this book devotes itself to tracing the uneasy distinctions between heckling camaraderie and antagonistic grudging, particularly between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and Eliot and Geoffrey Hill. Ricks wants to underline the difference between the challenge of true intellectual exchange (in which gratitude is key) and ruthless competition (in which it seems not to figure). In Ricks' account, poetry is a medium that makes particularly adept use of the former, especially through allusion. Contemporary poetry listens back on and makes its new music in dialog with the voices of the literary past, whether or not the later writer has the good grace gratefully to acknowledge that debt.

What does talk of gratitude add to a discussion of friendship, literary alliance and opposition's generative power? "Hill's poems make manifest a debt to Eliot which constitutes one of the highest [End Page 194] forms of gratitude, whilst Hill's criticism mostly sounds anything but grateful," writes Ricks, making lyric gratitude and debt line up as close allies of true friendship (29). Ricks thinks that Hill "sounds anything but grateful" (29). Yet Hill's prose and poetry are alert to the danger that there can be excesses of critical gratitude, and that adopting the position of what Ricks calls "the great grate" can lead to complaisance (3). This is a risk for the scholar as well as the poet. When Ricks writes "[t]he most that I have been able to do is express both a precipitated gratitude and some provoked reservations," or "I have published for more than forty years my gratitude for Hill's art and for Lowell's," or "[t]o Yale University Press, I am grateful too," ('Prefatory Note' x–xi) one might be put in mind of Hill's recent warning (delivered to his own audiences in the Clark Lectures) about the scholar's need to remain alert to "the power that can be conferred by popular attention," or "because of the priorities of […] specialist education."2 In that essay, Hill is criticising the late Eliot for adopting the guise of smiling public man and educated specialist, in which Hill sees Eliot failing to resist indulging in culpably winsome, self-interested public relations: "the celebrity […] was primed and waiting to receive The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism […] a recurring phenomenon of commodity culture and writers favoured by it […]." (562)

Ricks' criticism of Hill is a fresh response to Hill's recent criticisms of Ricks, and to a long-standing debate between them about the appropriate tone and pitch of Eliot's speech to readers. The generative sparring of True Friendship's ripostes is at once personally and critically motivated. Ricks is truly friendly in that he is also competitive with Hill. They spar over the figure of Eliot, over "Hill's ways with hyphens," and over the way poets and critics should address the common reader (5). Through this friendship both negotiate their audiences. That is, Ricks' debate about being "under the sign of" Eliot and Pound is also a tussle with worthy antagonists over the tradition of appropriate public speech, and over the use of...

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