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Kenneth Haynes. Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012. (Ed. Geoffrey Hill). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-19-960589-7. Pp. xiv + 973. $ 37.95. It is curious that Kenneth Haynes, the editor of this new volume of Hill’s collected poems, did not see fit to provide an introductory essay. One hesitates, after all, to commence a 973-page journey without even a cursory glance at a map. Also curious is the absence of explanatory notes in a book one assumes aims at being the definitive edition of one of contemporary poetry’s most ‘‘difficult’’ poets. With so little scholarly apparatus attached, one wonders what the purpose of a collected works might be. The most obvious answer, and one reason serious readers of contemporary poetry should be grateful to Haynes and to Oxford University Press, is convenience. Hill’s work can be difficult to track down in the States, especially if one wants to read all of his previous 17 books of poems, not counting previously selected poems. This single, readily available, and relatively affordable volume is thus a great kindness to anyone curious as to why Hill is so often referred to as England’s greatest living poet. Broken Hierarchies also justifies itself by offering four previously unpublished sequences in The Daybooks, the multivolume project comprised of all of Hill’s work since 2010’s Oraclau/Oracles. It is perhaps odd for a collected works to offer so much previously unpublished material, but Hill’s readers will nonetheless be grateful for what appears to be the finished arrangement of The Daybooks. Also unusual is the amount of revision the author has done on older volumes. As one might expect from an iconoclast like Hill, Broken Hierarchies partly justifies its existence as a collected works by troubling our very notion of that category of book. Perhaps, however, the most important advantage of a collected works is the opportunity it offers for reflecting on the whole of a body of work. By the time Hill’s first book, For the Unfallen, was published in 1959, the Eliotesque orthodoxy of the impersonal was already giving way to the new ‘‘confessional’’ poetry. It was, after all, the year also of Lowell’s Life Studies. Yet Hill’s earliest work seems, like Lowell’s earlier Lord Weary’s Castle, deeply committed to Eliot’s assertion that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (‘‘The Metaphysical Poets,’’ 1921) From the beginning of his career, Hill embraced the new critical emphasis on ambiguity and on difficulty, writing poems thick with allusion and grammatical density. Unlike many poets of his generation, however, he never clearly renounced 476 Christianity & Literature 64(4) the high modernist approach to poetry. In Hill’s 2000 interview in The Paris Review, he defends ‘‘difficult poetry,’’ arguing that [w]e 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 Art of Poetry,’’ no. 80, 2000) Hill’s appeal to democracy clearly runs counter to Eliot’s elitism, even while Hill shores up Eliot’s poetics. In this, he is interestingly part of a migration of ‘‘difficulty’’ from the high cultural conservatism of Eliot to the left, a shift seen in America with the association of leftist and even radical politics with the ‘‘difficult’’ L ¼ A ¼ N ¼ G ¼ U ¼ A ¼ G ¼ E poets, for instance. And yet, Hill’s ‘‘difficulty’’ is not all of one piece. From...

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