Beauty Will Save the World by Gregory Wolfe

Author:Gregory Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

O light of light, supreme delight;

grace on our lips to our disgrace.

Time roosts on all such golden wrists;

our leanness is our luxury.

Our love is what we love to have;

our faith is in our festivals.

In this and the other sections of Tenebrae Hill uses the traditional analogies between erotic and divine love to interpenetrate each other, revealing the tensions between sacrifice and possession.

A Political Dimension

Not all of Hill’s poetry is quite so mystical in bent; most of it, in fact, extends from the personal to the social realm, giving his art a historical and political dimension that has yet to be properly expounded. Like his modernist predecessors, Hill has an intense awareness of the past in the present, of the relationship between word and deed and between the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth. Much of Hill’s poetry has been written in response to the attitude taken by the Marxist critic, Theodor Adorno, who said: “No poetry after Auschwitz.” Hill has wrestled with the inadequacy of language to comprehend atrocity, but he has not surrendered the poet’s atoning work, nor has he escaped into artifice and wit in order to avoid harsh realities. The epigraph to his second volume of poetry, King Log, comes from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: “From moral virtue let us pass on to matter of power and commandment.” The dichotomy between power and morality implicit in Bacon’s words becomes Hill’s subject.

Unlike so many modern poets, Hill refuses to be drawn into partisan enthusiasms. His whole oeuvre enacts a drive toward objectivity and balance. Yet his “political” poetry is not a dry affair of weights and measures, but a passionate commitment to right order and the disciplines, moral and institutional, that restrain violence and rapacity. Hill’s political dimension cannot be separated from his historical consciousness: the past is not only a book of moral exempla, but alive in the present, whether recognized or not. The tangle of human deceit, sloth, hypocrisy, and lust for power changes little over time. Hill finds his political subjects in the War of the Roses, the two world wars (especially the Holocaust), British imperial conquests, even the American Civil War.

The power of Hill’s vision of social disorder arises not out of its originality, but in its balance of irony, satire, and compassion, its deft linking of personal and social spheres, and its metaphoric subtlety. Hill’s political understanding has been influenced primarily by Eliot and the Southern Agrarians. Though he refuses to sentimentalize bygone golden ages, he holds that a traditional, organic order guided by a common good has been supplanted by technocratic empires of capitalist or totalitarian varieties. His only political heroes are the Radical Tories of the nineteenth century—men who would be echoed by Charles Peguy. Another epigraph from a volume by Hill—this time Mercian Hymns—indicates his awareness of the crucial differences between a society oriented to transcendent principles of order and the leviathan state merely manipulating the “interests” of certain groups. The epigraph, worth quoting in full, is from the English poet C.

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