Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey William Hill (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet and literary critic who is widely regarded as the most important English-language poet of the second half of the twentieth century — a claim that is contested but not unreasonable. His poetry — from For the Unfallen (1959) through King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), and the astonishing late burst that produced ten collections between 1996 and 2013 — is characterised by its moral seriousness, its formal mastery, its engagement with English history and Christian theology, and its unyielding intellectual difficulty. He wrote as if every word had moral consequences, and the density and gravity of his verse can make other English poets seem frivolous.

Life

Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, the son of a police constable. The landscape of the West Midlands — the ancient kingdom of Mercia — pervades his work. He was educated at Bromsgrove County High School and Keble College, Oxford, and taught at the University of Leeds (1954–1980), the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College), and Boston University, where he was co-director of the Editorial Institute. He was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 2010 — a position he used to deliver a series of combative lectures defending difficulty in poetry.

Hill published slowly for the first three decades of his career — five slim collections in thirty years — and then, beginning with Canaan (1996), underwent a late creative explosion that produced more than ten collections in the final two decades of his life. He attributed the change partly to the successful treatment of a clinical depression that had inhibited his work for years.

The Early Work

For the Unfallen (1959) announced a major talent: poems of dense, formal, morally charged language that dealt with violence, history, and the difficulty of writing about suffering without aestheticising it. “Genesis,” “God’s Little Mountain,” and “September Song” — a poem about a child murdered in the Holocaust that contains the devastating line “This is plenty. This is more than enough” — established the themes and methods of Hill’s entire career.

King Log (1968) includes “Funeral Music,” a sequence of eight sonnets about the Wars of the Roses that is one of the great achievements of postwar English poetry: a meditation on political violence, religious faith, and the relationship between art and power written in a language of extraordinary compression and beauty.

Mercian Hymns (1971)

Mercian Hymns is Hill’s most widely admired work — a sequence of thirty prose poems that overlay the reign of Offa, the eighth-century king of Mercia, with the poet’s own childhood in the West Midlands. The poems move freely between the Anglo-Saxon past and the twentieth-century present, treating both with the same ceremonial gravity. A coin minted by Offa and a school exercise book, a royal charter and a council estate — all are treated as equivalently real and equivalently mysterious.

The sequence is Hill’s most accessible work, partly because the prose-poem form relaxes the syntactic compression of the verse poems, and partly because the autobiographical material gives the reader a human figure to hold onto.

Tenebrae (1978) and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)

Tenebrae — the title refers to the Holy Week office — is a collection of religious poems that engage with Spanish mysticism, baroque Catholicism, and the relationship between erotic and spiritual love. “Lachrimae,” a sequence of seven sonnets, is the high point: poems of agonised devotion that owe something to the metaphysical poets and something to Hopkins.

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983) is a long poem about the French Catholic socialist who was killed in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 — a meditation on the relationship between political commitment, religious faith, and violence.

The Late Work

Beginning with Canaan (1996) and continuing through The Triumph of Love (1998), Speech! Speech! (2000), The Orchards of Syon (2002), and subsequent collections, Hill produced a body of late work that is more discursive, more angry, more politically engaged, and more syntactically extreme than anything he had written before. The Triumph of Love is a long poem in 150 sections that ranges across the twentieth century — a fractured, furious, self-lacerating meditation on history, justice, and the failure of language.

The Question of Difficulty

Hill’s Oxford lectures mounted a sustained defence of difficulty in poetry — arguing that poetry should resist the consumer culture’s demand for easy accessibility, that the difficulty of his verse was a form of democratic respect for his readers (who were being treated as intelligent adults rather than passive consumers), and that the equation of obscurity with elitism was itself a capitulation to the market. The argument was characteristically combative and characteristically brilliant, though it did not entirely convince: some critics argued that Hill’s difficulty was not always productive, that some of the late work was wilfully obscure, and that the sheer volume of the late output represented a loss of the meticulous self-criticism that had distinguished the early work.

What is not in dispute is Hill’s stature. Along with Seamus Heaney — who was his near-contemporary and whose poetry represents almost the opposite approach to similar themes — Hill is the essential English poet of the late twentieth century. Where Heaney’s poetry reaches toward clarity and communion, Hill’s reaches toward density and judgment. Both positions are necessary; both are magnificent; and the tension between them defines the landscape of postwar English-language poetry.

Collecting Hill

For the Unfallen (1959, André Deutsch) in first edition brings $200–$500. Mercian Hymns (1971, André Deutsch) brings $100–$300. Tenebrae (1978) brings $50–$150. The late collections are more widely available. Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 (2013, Oxford University Press) is the essential collected volume.