Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016). Courtesy Scarriet.

Sir Geoffrey William Hill (18 June 1932 - 30 June 2016) was an English poet and academic, considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation.

Life

Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England, in 1932. When he was 6, his family moved to nearby Fairfield in Worcestershire, where he attended the local primary school, then the grammar school in Bromsgrove. "As an only child, he developed the habit of going for long walks alone, as an adolescent deliberating and composing poems as he muttered to the stones and trees." On these walks he often carried with him Oscar Williams' anthology, A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946); Hill speculates: "there was probably a time when I knew every poem in that anthology by heart."

In 1950 he was admitted to Keble College, Oxford to read English; there he published poems in 1952, at the age of 20, in an eponymous Fantasy Press volume (though he had published work in the Oxford Guardian — the magazine of the University Liberal Club — and The Isis).

Upon graduation from Oxford with a 1st, Hill embarked on an academic career, teaching at the University of Leeds from 1954 until 1980. After leaving Leeds, he spent a year at the University of Bristol on a Churchill Scholarship before becoming a teaching Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he taught from 1981 until 1988. He then moved to the United States, to serve as university professor and professor of literature and religion at Boston University. In 2006, he moved back to Cambridge, England.

In March 2010 Hill was confirmed as a candidate, with a broad base of academic support. He served as Professor until 2015.

Hill was married to Alice Goodman, and they have a daughter.

He died suddenly on June 30, 2016.

Writing

Hill's poetry encompasses a variety of styles, from the dense and allusive writing of King Log (1968) and Canaan (1997) to the simplified syntax of the sequence 'The Pentecost Castle' in Tenebrae (1978) to the more accessible poems of Mercian Hymns (1971), a series of 30 poems (sometimes called 'prose poems,' a label which Hill rejects in favour of 'versets') which juxtapose the history of Offa, 8th century ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, with Hill's own childhood in the modern Mercia of the West Midlands. Hill has also worked in related fields - in 1978, the Royal National Theatre in London staged his 'version for the English stage' of Brand by Henrik Ibsen, written in rhyming verse.

Regarding both his style and subject, Hill is often described as a "difficult" poet. In an interview in The Paris Review (2000), which published Hill's early poem 'Genesis' when he was still at Oxford, Hill defended the right of poets to difficulty as a form of resistance to the demeaning simplifications imposed by 'maestros of the world'. Hill also argued that to be difficult is to be democratic, equating the demand for simplicity with the demands of tyrants. He makes circumspect use of traditional rhetoric (as well as that of modernism), but he also transcribes the idioms of public life, such as those of television, political sloganeering, and punditry. Hill has been consistently drawn to morally problematic and violent episodes in British and European history. He has written poetic responses to the Holocaust in English, 'Two Formal Elegies', 'September Song' and 'Ovid in the Third Reich'. His accounts of landscape (especially that of his native Worcestershire) are as intense as his encounters with history.

Hill's distaste for conclusion, however, has led him, in 2000's Speech! Speech! (118), to scorn the latter argument as a glib get-out: 'ACCESSIBLE / traded as DEMOCRATIC, he answers / as he answers móst things these days | easily.' Throughout his corpus Hill is uncomfortable with the muffling of truth-telling that verse designed to sound well, for its contrivances of harmony, must permit. The constant buffets of Hill's suspicion of lyric eloquence — can it truly be eloquent? — against his talent for it (in Syon, a sky is 'livid with unshed snow') become in the poems a sort of battle in style, where passages of singing force (ToL: 'The ferns / are breast-high, head-high, the days / lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder') are balanced with prosaic ones of academese and inscrutable syntax. In the long interview collected in Haffenden's Viewpoints there is described the poet warring himself to witness honestly, to make language as tool say truly what he believes is true of the world.

Laurie Hill: "He can write poetry of great austere beauty and this appears occasionally in "Speech! Speech!," usually as description of a bleak landscape which may be a vision of old age or death. But the poetry is submerged in reams of evasive near-rant. The book consists of 120 twelve-line stanzas - the number is taken from De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom - but there is no sense of progression or closure; one feels that Hill could easily have written twice or ten times as many.... Hill's preoccupations are the same as those of the Pound of the Cantos. There is the same appeal to the culture of the past as infinitely better than the present, the same wide range of learning displayed for a few like-minded readers, the same belief that what interests the poet is all that matters, the same contempt for accessibility."

Critical reputation

The violence of Hill's aesthetic has been criticised by Irish poet-critic Tom Paulin, who draws attention to the poet's use of the Virgilian trope of 'rivers of blood' – as deployed infamously by Enoch Powell – to suggest that despite Hill's multi-layered irony and techniques of reflection, his lyrics draw their energies from an outmoded nationalism, expressed in what Hugh Haughton has described as a 'language of the past largely invented by the Victorians'. And yet Harold Bloom has called him 'the strongest British poet now active.'

For his part, Hill addressed some of the misperceptions about his political and cultural beliefs in a Guardian interview in 2002. There he suggested that his affection for the "radical Tories" of the 19th Century, while recently misunderstood as reactionary, was actually evidence of a progressive bent tracing back to his working class roots. He also indicated that he could no longer draw a firm distinction between "Blairite Labour" and the Thatcher-era Conservatives, lamenting that both parties had become solely oriented toward "materialism".

Recognition

Hill was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Leeds in 1988. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2009 his Collected Critical Writings won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.

In June 2010 he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry. He served as Professor until 2015.

Hill was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.

In popular culture

Hill's unmistakable style has also been subject to parody: Wendy Cope includes a parody of a 'Mercian Hymn' in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, and Ron Paste's parody 'Speech! Speech!|Preach! Preach!' appears in Other Men's Flowers under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Fogy Hell-Fire."

Publications

Poetry

• Poems (pamphlet). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Poetry Society, 1952.
• For the Unfallen: Poems, 1952-1958. Deutsch, 1959; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1960.
• Preghiere (pamphlet). Northern House, 1964.
• King Log. Dufour, 1968.
• Penguin Modern Poets 8 (by Edwin Brock, Geoffrey Hill, & Stevie Smith). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970.
• Mercian Hymns. Deutsch, 1971.
• Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems, 1952-1971 (includes For the Unfallen, King Log, and Mercian Hymns). Boston: Houghton, 1975.
• Tenebrae. Deutsch, 1978. Boston: Houghton, 1979.
• The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy. Agenda Editions, 1983; Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Collected Poems. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Houghton, 1994.
• Canaan. Houghton, 1997.
• The Triumph of Love. Houghton, 1998.
• Speech! Speech! Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000.
• The Orchards of Syon. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002.
• Scenes from Comus. London: Penguin, 2005.
• Without Title. London: Penguin, 2006.
• Selected Poems. London: Penguin; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
• A Treatise of Civil Power. London: Penguin, 2006.

Plays

• Brand (adapted 5-act version of play by Henrik Ibsen, produced in London at the National Theatre, 1978). London: Heinemann, 1978
  • revised edition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

Non-fiction

• The Lords of Limit: Essays on literature and ideas. Oxford University Press, 1984.
• The Enemy’s Country: Words, contexture and other circumstances of language. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Style and Faith. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2003.
• Collected Critical Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Geoffrey Hill reciting "The Storm"

September Song by Geoffrey Hill

Audio / video

• Geoffrey Hill Reading His Poems / Geoffrey Hill Speaks to P. Orr (cassette). London: British Council, 1965.
• The Poetry and Voice of Geoffrey Hill (cassette). New York: Caedmon, 1975.
• Geoffrey Hill Reading: Good Friday, 4/21/00 (cassette). Boston: Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 2000.
• Geoffrey Hill : Poetry reading, Oxford, 1st February 2006 (CD). Oxford, UK: Clutag, 2006.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

Preceded by Christopher Ricks

Oxford Professor of Poetry 2010-2015

Succeeded by Simon Armitage

External links

Poems

• Geoffrey Hill b. 1932 profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation.
• Texts by Geoffrey Hill.

Audio / video

• Geoffrey Hill at YouTube
• 'The Violent Bear it Away' Audio recording of a lecture on English translations of the Bible given at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Books

• Geoffrey Hill at Amazon.com

About

• Geoffrey Hill profile at the Academy of American Poets.
• Geoffrey Hill, 'one of the greatest English poets', dies aged 84 at The Guardian
• Carl Phillips (Spring 2000). "Geoffrey Hill, The Art of Poetry No. 80". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill. 
• "Geoffrey Hill: poetry should be shocking and surprising, interview at The Telegraph
• "Geoffrey Hill: Unparalleled Atonement", review of Selected Poems in The Critical Flame.
• Guardian profile of Hill, celebrating his 70th birthday
• Hill on the 'beautiful energy' of his poetry
• 'Language and Grace', review of The Orchards of Syon in the Oxonian Review
• "Some Aspects of the Tetragrammaton: On Geoffrey Hill" by Dipti Saravanamuttu
• 'Subduing the reader' by Laurie Smith in Magma, No. 23, Summer 2002
• "Geoffrey Hill: The most over-rated poet ever?" at Scarriet