"In the mythical conversation I am here conducting with the poet laureate on the question of poetry and democracy, I would wish to know her mind on the question of Walt Whitman’s distinction between ‘grand common stock’ on the one hand and ‘mean flat average on the other’ on the other. It is my strong conviction that anyone propounding or advocating an aesthetic and ethical continuity between texting and poetry would need to have at least a considered opinion on this matter. My own considered opinion, I scarcely need to stress this surely, is that texting is the very embodiment of the ‘mean flat average’ and that democratic poetry, such as the laureate writes, and wishes to encourage school children to write, must be the expression of the ‘grand common stock’. True poetry, I hope to get away with this utterly vacuous phrase, is not a series of textings about the world, the world that we have authored and desire to go on self-authorising, it is a kind of intensely crafted and parallel world, but not an alternative or better world, since it is not here to offer us escape. "
I'm not sure why Hill would even bother to make this argument. Texting? Isn't this shooting fish in a barrel—yes, the fish is dead, but is this really a defense of his own ideas about poetry, which, stripped of all his wasted citations, amount to very little argument in this essay. The poems he cites to criticize are execrable, Plath is execrable, mostly. He cites Whitman but he does not engage with Whitman's profound challenge to his ideas. I find his evocation of "grand common stock" to be simply annoying when he uses to distinguish between the kind of poetry he's writing and all else that is successful: Keats, Shakespeare, Hardy, Frost etc etc. Of course there's a place for his poetry, I'm not denying it. But the poems that follow his theory of the "grand common stock" are far more numerous than the poetry he's defending. I think his phrase derives from the Chaucerian and post-Chaucerian period in which English poetry was pre-authorial, and often amounted to translations from Ovid, but the effect of the phrase is a kind of condescension, rather than a distinction worthy of consideration. The "grand common stock" is in fact the main high road of English poetry. There has always been a gnomic impulse in poetry, the desire to create and solve puzzles, but it is a byway. If it were the only road, poetry would cease to matter to anyone.
I appreciate the publication of these lectures, Nik, and they certainly bring me back to my days in class with Hill. Of course, at the time, I thought he was grand, and I still do, but my impulse then as well as now is to try to put his sound and fury into a right relation to the art.
Execrable but also on the syllabus for every student enrolled to take an English literature GCSE in the UK. This one is admittedly very heavy with political questions that are now largely forgotten.
Many good poets have a soft spot for Plath but I’m not one of them, and I can’t imagine why Hill bothered. Who cares about grade school poetry? But why didn’t he make his argument with a poet like Elizabeth Bishop? I doubt his theory would fare so well with her.
You deserve a fuller response than the one I gave, Working Man -
On the quotation choice in this lecture; some of it was done to amuse the audience (what was funny then has largely dried up with time); some to carry on Hill's tirade against the political conditions in the UK, and in the english universities, which he associated with the Goacher/Whigham line on the Women of Trachis. The rest is for rhetorical purposes, aimed at Duffy, who here stands for contemporary poetry. Someone smarter than me (I think it was Northrop Frye) described rhetoric as language used for 'kinetic effect'. Hill wanted to knock down a paper idol.
On the 'Grand Common stock' - I do not think Hill meant to imply that such poetry was inferior. He distinguishes between the Platonic-Aristocratic and the Democratic modes, and obviously identifies his own 'creative philosophy' with the former; concerning the latter what he says about Whitman implies that the 'grand common stock' is the highest form of the democratic mode. If you take the list of poets who resist 'sentimental pillage' - Rimbaud, Rosenberg, Moore, Pound - these are obviously not poets of the grand common stock. However, Yeats did use the grand common stock, as did Swift. Hill admired Whitman, certainly a lot more than Pound did. There are many other examples - even the Earl of Surrey, in his own way.
As for Plath, this is only the second time he mentions her in all of his critical writings, which is a good measure of how he valued her poetry. The other time Plath is discussed, it is to question her 'urge to fantasize a cruel psychology for her dead father'.
I'm working on something I hope to get published soon; after that I am want to write a short(ish) piece on Hill's poetics for this substack.
"In the mythical conversation I am here conducting with the poet laureate on the question of poetry and democracy, I would wish to know her mind on the question of Walt Whitman’s distinction between ‘grand common stock’ on the one hand and ‘mean flat average on the other’ on the other. It is my strong conviction that anyone propounding or advocating an aesthetic and ethical continuity between texting and poetry would need to have at least a considered opinion on this matter. My own considered opinion, I scarcely need to stress this surely, is that texting is the very embodiment of the ‘mean flat average’ and that democratic poetry, such as the laureate writes, and wishes to encourage school children to write, must be the expression of the ‘grand common stock’. True poetry, I hope to get away with this utterly vacuous phrase, is not a series of textings about the world, the world that we have authored and desire to go on self-authorising, it is a kind of intensely crafted and parallel world, but not an alternative or better world, since it is not here to offer us escape. "
I'm not sure why Hill would even bother to make this argument. Texting? Isn't this shooting fish in a barrel—yes, the fish is dead, but is this really a defense of his own ideas about poetry, which, stripped of all his wasted citations, amount to very little argument in this essay. The poems he cites to criticize are execrable, Plath is execrable, mostly. He cites Whitman but he does not engage with Whitman's profound challenge to his ideas. I find his evocation of "grand common stock" to be simply annoying when he uses to distinguish between the kind of poetry he's writing and all else that is successful: Keats, Shakespeare, Hardy, Frost etc etc. Of course there's a place for his poetry, I'm not denying it. But the poems that follow his theory of the "grand common stock" are far more numerous than the poetry he's defending. I think his phrase derives from the Chaucerian and post-Chaucerian period in which English poetry was pre-authorial, and often amounted to translations from Ovid, but the effect of the phrase is a kind of condescension, rather than a distinction worthy of consideration. The "grand common stock" is in fact the main high road of English poetry. There has always been a gnomic impulse in poetry, the desire to create and solve puzzles, but it is a byway. If it were the only road, poetry would cease to matter to anyone.
I appreciate the publication of these lectures, Nik, and they certainly bring me back to my days in class with Hill. Of course, at the time, I thought he was grand, and I still do, but my impulse then as well as now is to try to put his sound and fury into a right relation to the art.
Execrable but also on the syllabus for every student enrolled to take an English literature GCSE in the UK. This one is admittedly very heavy with political questions that are now largely forgotten.
Thanks very much, Nik. Of course, I’m rehearsing arguments I never would have dared to have with him.
Many good poets have a soft spot for Plath but I’m not one of them, and I can’t imagine why Hill bothered. Who cares about grade school poetry? But why didn’t he make his argument with a poet like Elizabeth Bishop? I doubt his theory would fare so well with her.
You deserve a fuller response than the one I gave, Working Man -
On the quotation choice in this lecture; some of it was done to amuse the audience (what was funny then has largely dried up with time); some to carry on Hill's tirade against the political conditions in the UK, and in the english universities, which he associated with the Goacher/Whigham line on the Women of Trachis. The rest is for rhetorical purposes, aimed at Duffy, who here stands for contemporary poetry. Someone smarter than me (I think it was Northrop Frye) described rhetoric as language used for 'kinetic effect'. Hill wanted to knock down a paper idol.
On the 'Grand Common stock' - I do not think Hill meant to imply that such poetry was inferior. He distinguishes between the Platonic-Aristocratic and the Democratic modes, and obviously identifies his own 'creative philosophy' with the former; concerning the latter what he says about Whitman implies that the 'grand common stock' is the highest form of the democratic mode. If you take the list of poets who resist 'sentimental pillage' - Rimbaud, Rosenberg, Moore, Pound - these are obviously not poets of the grand common stock. However, Yeats did use the grand common stock, as did Swift. Hill admired Whitman, certainly a lot more than Pound did. There are many other examples - even the Earl of Surrey, in his own way.
As for Plath, this is only the second time he mentions her in all of his critical writings, which is a good measure of how he valued her poetry. The other time Plath is discussed, it is to question her 'urge to fantasize a cruel psychology for her dead father'.
I'm working on something I hope to get published soon; after that I am want to write a short(ish) piece on Hill's poetics for this substack.