Shaggy Fellows

David Norbrook

• A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After by David Perkins
  Harvard, 694 pp, £19.95, April 1987, ISBN 0 674 39946 3
• Collected Poems by Geoffrey Hill
  Penguin, 207 pp, £3.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 14 008383 9
• The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill by Henry Hart
  Southern Illinois, 305 pp, $24.95, January 1986, ISBN 0 8093 1236 0

‘In the gloom, gold gathers the light against it.’ In choosing this line from Pound’s 11th Canto as one of the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, Geoffrey Hill concentrates our attention on one of the central problems posed by Pound’s poetry and explored by his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt. As David Perkins points out in Modernism and After, Pound is incomparable amongst modern poets for the rhythmic subtlety of his evocation of sensuous beauty, of the play of light and shade. For Perkins, this lyricism is the redeeming feature of his poetry. He deplores Pound’s fascistic and anti-semitic politics, but he feels able to abstract the beauty from the politics. ‘Evaluation,’ he says, ‘is always personal’; he enjoys the lyrical passages, and for him these outweigh the political unpleasantness.