Geoffrey Hill’s keyword “contexture” is legible, appropriately enough, as a portmanteau word: “context” worked together with “texture”, the textualisation of circumstances (typically adverse). The operator of this textualisation is “style”, which throughout the four essays in Hill’s The Enemy’s Country is given as a name for the engagement of the maker’s “factive virtù” with the ”negotium” of language. It is in the weighing of words, the calculation and execution of “brush-strokes”, that the artist encounters the weight of the world, already at work in language as the inertia and entanglement of sense.

In the last essay, on Pound’s “Envoi (1919)”, Hill weighs up Pound’s pronouncement: “you cannot call a man an artist until he shows himself capable of reticence and restraint, until he shows himself in some degree master of the forces which beat upon him”. If “master of the forces” sounds butch, “in some degree” indicates a hesitation, which “reticence and restraint” compounds: the capability Pound is speaking of here shows itself negatively, as containment of the pressure of speech or management of the compulsions of cliché. Coleridge’s “not to speak whereof I needs must feel” is a related capacity (Pound wrote that “the function of an art is to free the intellect from the tyranny of the affects”). What distinguishes Pound’s “artist” from his “tiro” is not expressive force, but deliberative power.

This distinction certainly suits Pound’s own cranky, judgemental critical persona, which exhibits itself to great effect in the early essays (on Arnaut Daniel, etc.). These combine gifted imposture, hard-won insight, and a noted propensity for shooting from the hip, all of which suggest that Pound might if he chose have made himself quite at home in the contemporary blogosphere. Hill (and Hill’s later poetry) is alert to the ways in which this persona, a great enabler of Pound’s early poetic career, itself becomes one of the obstacles with which the caged, disgraced, defeated author of the Pisan Cantos must bring himself to reckon: “the stubbornness of one’s dogmatism, the force of one’s hubris, are themselves factors in the world’s general arbitrariness”.

Pound’s importance to Hill seems to stem from his perception that there exist questions of “intrinsic value” that are not to be settled on terms dictated by the hawkers and jostlers of Opinion: “We see to kalon | Decreed in the market place”, but it is the duty of art to measure and resist the force of such decrees. Here two “tyrannies” coincide: that of “the affects”, from which “the intellect” struggles to disentangle itself, and that of a public sphere governed by “the ruling imbecilities”. One may see in Pound’s effort to detach himself from both loci the cause of his disastrous adherence to fascism, and of the (political-aesthetic) obscurity which commands the Cantos even where Pound’s deliberative power is seemingly at its most acute. From there it is a short step to the moral drawn by Lewis Hyde: the circulation of desires and commodities is not to be regarded as contemptible in itself, since circulation is a necessary condition for the flourishing of artistic gifts.

If the Cantos give the impression of having been made to serve as the fractured cornerstone of a cultus, each “more incomprehensible than the one preceding it”, then their utility as weapons of “the intelligence at bay, of intelligence fighting against an alignment of odds” is at best compromised by the allegiances to which that intelligence turned for its own temporary security. The worst we know. But seeing Pound’s road to ruin in this way, as a drama of detachment and attachment with whatever is of value in the journey “a brief gasp between one cliché and another”, we have not left what Hill calls “the domain of the merely ‘sincere’ (which is ephemeral and solipsistic)”. If the sincerity of Pound’s attachment to Mussolini is not, alas, to be doubted, his self-given “task… of transposing ‘bravery’” out of this domain and into “a form of ‘substance’ and ‘colour’ successfully detached from the ephemeral” remains unaccounted for in this biographical schema.

To say that “rhythm is a form cut into TIME” is to say that poetic form establishes, by means of a cut, its own duration: “the ephemeral” is convoked as the antagonistic support for this operation, much as the wish to free the intellect from the tyranny of the affects, as Hill remarks, “remains embedded in affects; requires, indeed, those dispositions or predispositions to effect its freedom from them”. But this requisitioning by “intrinsic value” of the extrinsic and accidental in order “to effect its freedom from them” is not the same as the entrusting of “gifts” to the “erotic” fluency of circulation. At the heart of the matter is an argument about the nature of “freedom”: is it to be found in the dissolution of boundaries, the passage of every thing beyond its assigned identity, or in subtraction from the ephemeral domain of such opportune transformations and equivalences, the long-labouring effort to inscribe a form of “One substance and one colour / Braving time”?