Geoffrey Hill
Encyclopedia
Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute
, at Boston University
. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation. In June 2010 he was elected Professor of Poetry
in the University of Oxford
.
, Worcestershire
, England
, in 1932. When he was six, 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
' A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry
(1946), and 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, where he published his first poems in 1952, at the age of twenty, 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 first
, 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.
Hill is married to Alice Goodman
, and they have one daughter.
; 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 the University of Oxford
, with a broad base of academic support. He was ultimately successful.
, eighth 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.
, who draws attention to the poet's use of the Virgil
ian 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 Red Torys" 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".
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 'Preach! Preach!' appears in Other Men's Flowers under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Fogy Hell-Fire."
Editorial Institute
The Editorial Institute at Boston University was founded in 2000 by Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill with "the conviction that the textually sound, contextually annotated edition is central to the intellectual life of many disciplines." The primary aims of the Institute are to promote critical...
, at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation. In June 2010 he was elected Professor of Poetry
Oxford Professor of Poetry
The chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford is an unusual academic appointment, now held for a term of five years, and chosen through an election open to all members of Convocation, namely, all graduates and current academics of the university; in 2010, on-line voting was allowed....
in the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
.
Biography
Geoffrey Hill was born in BromsgroveBromsgrove
Bromsgrove is a town in Worcestershire, England. The town is about north east of Worcester and south west of Birmingham city centre. It had a population of 29,237 in 2001 with a small ethnic minority and is in Bromsgrove District.- History :Bromsgrove is first documented in the early 9th century...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, in 1932. When he was six, 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
Oscar Williams
Oscar Williams was an American anthologist and poet. Oscar Williams was his pen name.-Life:He was born Oscar Kaplan in Letychiv, Ukraine, son of Jewish parents Mouzya Kaplan and Chana Rapoport...
' A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American is an anthology of poetry, edited by Oscar Williams, which was published by Scribner's, New York, in 1946, and Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, in 1947...
(1946), and 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
Keble College, Oxford
Keble College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its main buildings are on Parks Road, opposite the University Museum and the University Parks. The college is bordered to the north by Keble Road, to the south by Museum Road, and to the west by Blackhall...
to read English, where he published his first poems in 1952, at the age of twenty, in an eponymous Fantasy Press
Fantasy Press (poetry)
The Fantasy Press was an English publisher of poetry between 1951 and 1959.The company was established by Oscar Mellor in Swinford, Oxfordshire primarily to finance his work as a surrealist artist, but gained a high profile through discovering a series of poets who became major figures of The...
volume (though he had published work in the Oxford Guardian — the magazine of the University Liberal Club — and The Isis
Isis magazine
The Isis Magazine was established at Oxford University in 1892 . Traditionally a rival to the student newspaper Cherwell, it was finally acquired by the latter's publishing house, OSPL, in the late 1990s...
).
Upon graduation from Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
with a first
British undergraduate degree classification
The British undergraduate degree classification system is a grading scheme for undergraduate degrees in the United Kingdom...
, Hill embarked on an academic career, teaching at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
from 1954 until 1980. After leaving Leeds, he spent a year at the University of Bristol
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...
on a Churchill Scholarship before becoming a teaching Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay on the site of a Dominican friary...
, where he taught from 1981 until 1988. He then moved to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, to serve as University Professor
University Professors Program
The University Professors Program was a program within Boston University that granted degrees in fields that combined, bridged, or fell between established intellectual disciplines. Consulting closely with faculty, students designed their own cross-disciplinary programs of study that often...
and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. In 2006, he moved back to Cambridge, England.
Hill is married to Alice Goodman
Alice Goodman
Alice Goodman , American poet, was educated at Harvard University and Cambridge where she studied English and American literature. She received her Master of Divinity degree from the Boston University School of Theology. She has written the libretti for two of the operas of John Adams, Nixon in...
, and they have one daughter.
Awards and honours
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, CambridgeEmmanuel College, Cambridge
Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay on the site of a Dominican friary...
; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
; and since 1996 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. In 2009 his Collected Critical Writings won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Estate. The value of the award is $30,000 , and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language...
, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.
Oxford candidacy
In March 2010 Hill was confirmed as a candidate in the election of the Professor of PoetryOxford Professor of Poetry
The chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford is an unusual academic appointment, now held for a term of five years, and chosen through an election open to all members of Convocation, namely, all graduates and current academics of the university; in 2010, on-line voting was allowed....
in the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, with a broad base of academic support. He was ultimately successful.
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 thirty poems (sometimes called 'prose-poems' a label which Hill rejects in favour of 'versets') which juxtapose the history of OffaOffa of Mercia
Offa was the King of Mercia from 757 until his death in July 796. The son of Thingfrith and a descendant of Eowa, Offa came to the throne after a period of civil war following the assassination of Æthelbald after defeating the other claimant Beornred. In the early years of Offa's reign it is likely...
, eighth century ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia
Mercia
Mercia was one of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in the region now known as the English Midlands...
, with Hill's own childhood in the modern Mercia of the West Midlands
West Midlands (region)
The West Midlands is an official region of England, covering the western half of the area traditionally known as the Midlands. It contains the second most populous British city, Birmingham, and the larger West Midlands conurbation, which includes the city of Wolverhampton and large towns of Dudley,...
. Hill has also worked in related fields - in 1978, the Royal National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
staged his 'version for the English stage' of Brand
Brand (play)
Brand is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It is a verse tragedy, written in 1865 and first performed in Stockholm on 24 March 1867. Brand was an intellectual play that provoked much original thought....
by Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
, 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
John Haffenden
Professor John Haffenden is an academic in the field of Literature at the University of Sheffield.-Education and positions held:He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin , where he edited Icarus, and Oxford University . He has spent periods as a Fellow of the Yaddo Foundation, New York; as a...
'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.
Controversy, explanation and parody
The violence of Hill's aesthetic has been criticised by the Irish poet-critic Tom PaulinTom Paulin
Thomas Neilson Paulin is a Northern Irish poet and critic of film, music and literature. He lives in England, where he is the GM Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.- Life and work :...
, who draws attention to the poet's use of the Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
ian trope of 'rivers of blood' – as deployed infamously by Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell, MBE was a British politician, classical scholar, poet, writer, and soldier. He served as a Conservative Party MP and Minister of Health . He attained most prominence in 1968, when he made the controversial Rivers of Blood speech in opposition to mass immigration from...
– 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
Hugh Haughton
Hugh Haughton is an academic, author, editor and specialist in Irish literature and the literature of nonsense.Born in Cork in the Republic of Ireland and educated at Cambridge and Oxford, Hugh Haughton is a Professor at the University of York....
has described as a 'language of the past largely invented by the Victorians'. And yet Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
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
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
interview in 2002. There he suggested that his affection for the "radical Red Torys" 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".
Hill's unmistakable style has also been subject to parody: Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope, OBE is an award-winning contemporary English poet. She read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She now lives in Ely with the poet Lachlan Mackinnon.-Biography:...
includes a parody of a 'Mercian Hymn' in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, and Ron Paste's parody 'Preach! Preach!' appears in Other Men's Flowers under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Fogy Hell-Fire."
Poetry collections
- For the Unfallen (1959)
- King Log (1968)
- Mercian Hymns (1971) winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett PrizeAlice Hunt Bartlett PrizeThe Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize was awarded by the Poetry Society of London for a collection of poetry.-Winners:* 1966: Gavin Bantock for Christ: A Poem in 26 parts and Paul Roche for All Things Considered...
- Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952-1971 (1975)
- Tenebrae (1978)
- The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)
- New and Collected Poems (1994)
- Canaan (1997)
- The Triumph of Love (1998)
- Speech! Speech! (2000)
- The Orchards of Syon (2002)
- Scenes from Comus (2005)
- A Treatise of Civil Power (Clutag PressClutag PressThe Clutag Press was established in 2000 as a venture by Andrew McNeillie to issue Clutag Poetry Leaflets, by established and emerging poets. In 2004, it received backing from The Christopher Tower Fund...
, 2005) - Without TitleWithout TitleWithout Title is a book of poems by Geoffrey Hill. It was published by Penguin in 2006 .The first book of the Hill's late writing period ....
(2006) - Selected Poems (2006)
- A Treatise of Civil Power (PenguinPenguin BooksPenguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
, 2007) - Oraclau | Oracles (Clutag PressClutag PressThe Clutag Press was established in 2000 as a venture by Andrew McNeillie to issue Clutag Poetry Leaflets, by established and emerging poets. In 2004, it received backing from The Christopher Tower Fund...
, 2010) - Odi Barbare (Clutag PressClutag PressThe Clutag Press was established in 2000 as a venture by Andrew McNeillie to issue Clutag Poetry Leaflets, by established and emerging poets. In 2004, it received backing from The Christopher Tower Fund...
, 2011) - Clavics (Enitharmon PressEnitharmon PressEnitharmon Press is an independent British publishing house specialising in poetry.The name of the press comes from the poetry of William Blake: Enitharmon was a character who represented spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. The press's logo "derives from a Blake woodcut".-History:The Press was...
, 2011) Enitharmon Press - Al Tempo de' Tremuoti (forthcoming)
- Familiar Epistles (Enitharmon PressEnitharmon PressEnitharmon Press is an independent British publishing house specialising in poetry.The name of the press comes from the poetry of William Blake: Enitharmon was a character who represented spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. The press's logo "derives from a Blake woodcut".-History:The Press was...
(forthcoming) - Collected Poems 1952-2012 (Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, (forthcoming 2013)
Essay collections
- The Lords of Limit (1984)
- The Enemy's Country (1991)
- Style and Faith (2003)
- Collected Critical Writings (2008)
External links
- "Geoffrey Hill: Unparalleled Atonement" Review Selected Poems in The Critical Flame.
- Profile at Poets.org
- Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
- Guardian profile of Hill, celebrating his 70th birthday
- BBC 18 June 2010 "Geoffrey Hill named Oxford poetry professor"
- Hill on the 'beautiful energy' of his poetry
- 'Subduing the reader' by Laurie Smith in Magma, No. 23, Summer 2002
- 'Language and Grace', review of The Orchards of Syon in the Oxonian Review
- 'The Violent Bear it Away' Audio recording of a lecture on English translations of the Bible given at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.