Hi Matt,
That's my favorite Geoffrey Hill poem. Like the Wallace Stevens I posted earlier, I find it quite specific, though the opening sentence is paratactic and lacks a verb. The two are often called difficult, which is perhaps not the same thing as obscure. Aaron N makes a nice point about beauty before understanding, and since I think many Americans won't know Hill, it seemed worth posting a short poem of his which exemplifies that for me. French has an expression tiré par les cheveux, or sophistical perhaps, which a teacher I knew called capillotracté. That is when art loses me: sophomoric obscurity, obscurity for its own sake. Necessary obscurity doesn’t bug me – thus, The Critique of Pure Reason, for instance, as opposed to, say, Jung or Hegel, who seem to like showing off or confusing people. As we all know, it takes a lot of work to be simple. But being as simple as possible is a worthy goal in art as in science.
Cheers,
John
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