In April 1919 Eliot wrote the following to a former teacher of his at Harvard:
'There are only two ways in which a writer can become important - to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little. It is a question of temperament. I write very little and I should not become more powerful by increasing my output. My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.'
Quoting this in an article published in Agenda, Geoffrey Hill sets out the extenuating circumstances for Eliot's frigid ambition, and proceeds, 'however, I find that the letter places a remarkably heavy stress on the particulars of career-making. Eliot's self-evaluation is in terms of a calculating idealism; the effect is gratingly oxymoronic, "important", "powerful", "reputation", "event"; the commitment suggested by "perfect in their kind" is abraded in the surrounding context'. ('Surrounding context'? Surely that's a tautology, Mr Hill.)
But as Geoffrey Hill demonstrates in the same essay, the Ez and Possum reputation game can even be played solo. Taking two words from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ('ah, soldier'), Hill says Christopher Ricks showed unparalleled acuity in saying Eliot was a genius if only in pointing out that Shakespeare was a genius for adding those two words to his source text. (Got that? Good.) Ricks, though, was not quite up to the mark in approving of Eliot's recourse to cliché in Four Quartets. Who does that leave on the rostrum? I make it Bill and Hill.
The article is entitled 'Dividing Legacies'. It follows extracts from Hill's 'Psalms of Assize'. Then there was 'Did Péguy kill Jaurès?' His focus is not poetic but forensic. The man missed a fine career as a hanging judge. He is a good poet; if he seems to evince the 'pleasure in varying the accepted postures of judicial death' which he finds in one of his subjects, that's his affair. But he has this habit of putting good poems in the dead mouths of great poets and others: Boethius, Campanella, Bonhoeffer; when the torturer has finished with them Hill takes over. There are plenty of examples, but to me the most galling and inept is the one on Aleksandr Blok (what are all those Roman gods doing there?). Here is S.J. Ellis 'On Geoffrey Hill's Decade of Reticence'(PN Review 98, 51-2).

'Intermittently, Hill mimics Blok:

into the rain's
horizons, peacock-dyed
tail-feathers of storm,
so it goes on.

"So it goes on": the wry aside comments upon the heightened rhetoric of dazzling vagueness in Blok's poetic vocabulary'.

Ignorance in praise of arrogance! Is no cadaver safe from Hill's ventriloquy? None. Not even if, like Blok in later years, you try to live 'stiller than water, lower than grass'. It might be objected that I should be taking issue not with Hill but with his less critical critics (only a true fan could see the fact that Hill wasn't writing as something to write about), but a real poet does in the long run set the tone of the criticism; unlike Hill's own chosen subjects, he is still in a position to object to what is said about him. Besides, what does Hill do to Blok? He begins his poem with an epigraph that makes Blok appear a pretentious fool. It's a quote from Volokhova, the subject of a number of Blok's poems 'Joyfully I accept this strange book, joyfully and with fear - in it there is so much beauty, poetry, death. I await the accomplishment of your task'. She was an actress and she said what she thought she was supposed to say, sometimes with fine results: 'having been endowed by nature with a tragic style of beauty I had too much good taste to cultivate a cheerful personality' (Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok (OUP 1979), I, 266). Blok did learn to speak for Russia, in a way that would move almost anyone; Hill tries hard to speak for his own country, but I don't believe he has it in him.
You may have gathered by this stage that what prompted me to this attack was Hill's apparent condescension to Aleksandr Blok. To put it bluntly, no poet alive is big enough to look down on Blok. And gey few of the deid. It is only after my outburst, though, that I see that my two complaints about Hill are related, and realise that there is no point in looking farther into his poetry, because the crux of his practice is a turning away from the essential - in himself and in his subjects. A writer's obsession with martyrdom is an obsession with reputation - ultimately his or her own reputation - and this focus on accident fudges the poetry.
Boethius is important not because of his execution (on which Hill lingers 'Iron buckles gagged; flesh leaked rennet over them; the men stooped, disentangled the body' ('Mercian Hymns', XVIII) but because of the Consolations of Philosophy. Campanella's name remains with us not because he survived torture in the Inquisition jails for many years but because of his poems, and because of The City of the Sun - which, by the way, shows Campanella's authoritarian nature. I wouldn't have wanted to land up in one of his jails. There's no inkling of that in Hill's account. Hill repeatedly invokes the argument of blood - that because blood has been shed over it, the matter is important. Would he ever have written about Robert Desnos if Desnos hadn't died in a Nazi camp? I doubt it. But in Celan, in Mandelshtam, in Desnos, the death is not the central fact: the poems are.