"An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent."

Geoffrey Hill Literature See all quotes by Geoffrey Hill →

React to this quote

More by Geoffrey Hill

“Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation”

“The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,”

“It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.”

“Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite”

“The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.”

“To say a poet is to be condemned or inaccessible because she invokes some fields of vision which we have difficulty in grasping; this seems to me a crass kind of bullying.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The natural balance of the constitution is this—that the Crown should appoint its ministers, that those ministers should have the confidence of the House of Commons, and that the House of Commons shou…"

— John Russell

Journalism1792–1878

#love

"The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion... here is a great…"

— Neil Postman

Literature1931–2003

#faith

"On the whole, I have annoyances to bear, of which you can hardly form a conception. One of them is the mutual jealousy of almost all the French officers, particularly against those of higher rank than…"

— Johann de Kalb

Military1721–1780

#Human Nature

"Military history, especially Russian, is being studied poorly. We have a lot of unfair ridiculing of the old army despite the fact that we had such notable tsarist army generals as Suvorov, Kutuzov an…"

— Lev Mekhlis

Military1889–1953

#war