- Some notes on Geoffery Hill For NET/ SET preparation.
- Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith.
- He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family.
- He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall.
- Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy.
- In early collections such as King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought “to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,” according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. Hill’s book Tenebrae (1978), “meaning ‘darkness’ in Latin,” is concerned with the Good Friday ritual in which candles are extinguished to symbolize the crucifixion of Jesus.
- One of Hill’s most overtly religious works, the book explores closed forms such as the sonnet while gesturing, in his typically allusive fashion, back to older literature as well. Harper’s critic Hayden Carruth simply called Tenebrae “the best book of devotional poetry in the modern high style since [T.S.]Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday.”
- Tenebrae was followed by the long poem The Mystery of Charity of Charles Peguy (1983). Toward the end of the 1990s, Hill cofounded the Editorial Institute with fellow luminary critic and professor Christopher Ricks.
- They formed the Editorial Institute with the conviction that the textually sound, contextually annotated edition is central to the life of many academic disciplines. Though echoing critical orthodoxy on Hill’s accessibility, Logan did admit that “more than any poet alive, Hill has the pulse of English inside him, knowing like a lawyer all its loopholes and vagrancies.
- Hill’s Selected Poems appeared in 2006 to a flood of reviews and commendations. Patrick Kurp, reviewing the volume for the Quarterly Conversation remarked that it was “odd to think that Hill, the bane of postmodern poets and critics, may be the most ‘avant-garde’ poet working today.
- He pushes the resources of English—etymology, music, multiplicity of meaning, rhetorical devices—further than other writers dare. His poems can be as densely allusive, multi-voiced, polylingual, dissonant, and radically playful as Finnegans Wake.
- Antoine-Williams saw Hill’s project one of contextualization and appraisal; Hill’s understanding of literary history and “depth and breadth of reading…allows Hill to assess not only artistic achievement but also the contribution of the author to an intellectual tradition. … Taken as a whole, the critical works make up a rich and rigorous philosophy of literature, supremely well nourished by a vast range of poetic, political, metaphysical and theological writings of the past 500 years.
- This is why Hill may have written the most important collection of poet’s prose to appear in his lifetime.
- Anyone who cares about literature will want to understand his reasons for caring about it.” Hill received numerous awards and honors for his work including the Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Loines Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- In 2010 Hill was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at Oxford for five years. He was knighted in 2012, a ceremony he participated in to honor his parents. As Adam Kirsch wrote in a review of Without Title,”Mr. Hill [is] one of the most fascinating poets at work today—one whose every new book promises a revelation.”
- Hill died in 2016, leaving behind a massive collection of poetry and criticism dating back to the 1950s.
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