Geoffrey Hill
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Geoffrey Hill (b. June 18, 1932) - British poet, Professor of English Literature and Religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute (http://www.bu.edu/editinst/) at Boston University.
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Biography
Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in 1932. At the age of six, his family moved to nearby Fairfield, where he attended the local primary school, then grammar school in Bromsgrove. In 1950 he was admitted to Keble College, Oxford to read English, where published his first poems in 1952, at the age of twenty, in a eponymous Fantasy Press volume edited by Donald Davie.
After graduating from Keble, Hill embarked upon 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 take up the position he currently holds as University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. He returns to England frequently.
Professor Hill was awarded an honorary DLitt from the University of Leeds in 1988. He is also Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is married to Alice Goodman.
Writing
Geoffrey Hill is widely considered one of the most idiosyncratic poets of his generation. Set apart from contemporary 'Movement' writers of the 1950s, and seemingly uninfluenced by the writers of subsequent decades, Hill is often described as a 'difficult', 'inaccessible' or 'obscure' poet, due to his characteristically dense and allusive writing style, with its grounding in Anglican theology and ancient British history.
Hill is most widely known for the Mercian Hymns (1971), a series of thirty prose poems 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.
His latest volume is Scenes from Comus (2005). His latest poetry continues his concern with England, being centred around Milton's Comus, a masque performed at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire....
- This is a fabled England, vivid
- in winter bareness; bleakly comforting
- the faded orchard's hover of grey-green.
- We have come home.
Bibliography
Poetry
- For the Unfallen (1958)
- King Log (1968)
- Mercian Hymns (1971)
- 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)
Essays
- The Lords of Limit (1984)
- The Enemy's Country (1991)
- Style and Faith (2003)
Links
- Faculty Page at Boston University (http://www.bu.edu/religion/faculty/individualfaculty/hill.htm)
- Geoffrey Hill Study Centre (http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/geoffrey_hill_index.htm)
- The Geoffrey Hill Server (http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/anglais/geoffrey-hill/english/geoffrey-hill.php)
- Guardian profile of Hill, celebrating his 70th birthday (http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4478610-110738,00.html)
- Hill on the 'beautiful energy' of his poetry (http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4505022-110738,00.html)