Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill (b. June 18, 1932) - British poet, Professor of English Literature and Religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University.

Writing

Geoffrey Hill is widely considered one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Set apart from contemporary 'Movement' writers of the 1950s, and seemingly uninfluenced by the writers of subsequent decades, Hill's writing encompasses a variety of styles, from the dense and allusive writing of "King Log" (1968) or "Canaan" (1997) to the simplified syntax of the sequence "The Pentecost Castle" in "Tenebrae" (1978) to the more directly accessible poems of the "Mercian Hymns" (1971), one of his most widely read books, a series of thirty poems (sometimes called "prose poem," a label which Hill rejects) which juxtapose the history of Offa, eighth-century ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, with Hill's own childhood in the modern Mercia of the West Midlands.

Related Topics:
Movement - Offa - Mercia

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Hill is frequently described as a difficult and demanding poet. This is a reflection of both his style and subject. He makes full use of traditional rhetoric, including Modernist techniques, but he also (especially in his later work) incorporates the languages of public life, including those of media entertainment, political slogans, and the pronouncements of pundits. For his subject, Hill has frequently been drawn to morally ambiguous and often violent episodes in British and European history, though it should be noted that his descriptions of landscape (especially of his native Worcestershire) have the same intensity as the history. In an interview in the "Paris Review" (2000), Hill defended the right of poets sometimes to be difficult as one form of resistance to the demeaning and profitable simplifications imposed by the "maestros of world".

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