Background
Hill was born on June 18, 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.
(The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty y...)
The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty years of Hill's published criticism, in a revised final form, and also adds much new work. It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic whom A. N. Wilson has called "probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose." In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context - political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's "The Night", his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary. Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in "Our Word is Our Bond", "Language, Suffering, and Value", and "Poetry and Value". In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199234485/?tag=2022091-20
( Geoffrey Hills poetry comprises one of the most uncomp...)
Geoffrey Hills poetry comprises one of the most uncompromising and visionary bodies of work written over the last fifty years. Imbued with the weight of history, morality, and language, his work reveals a deeply religious sensibility, a towering intellect, and an emotional complexity that are unrivaled in contemporary letters. Now, for the first time ever, readers can observe in one volume how Hills style took shape over time. This generous selection spans his career, beginning with poems from Hills astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, and following through to his stylistically distinct and critically acclaimed work Without Title. Including some of the poets strongest, most sensitive, and most brilliant pieces, this collection will reaffirm Hills reputation as Englands best hope for the Nobel Prize.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300164300/?tag=2022091-20
(Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geof...)
Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geoffrey Hill, written over sixty years, and presents them in their definitive form. Four of these books (Ludo, Expostulations on the Volcano, Liber Illustrium Virorum, and Al Tempo de' Tremuoti) have never before appeared in print, and three of them (Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres, Pindarics, and Clavics) have been greatly revised and expanded.
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( Praise for Geoffrey Hills newest collection of poems: ...)
Praise for Geoffrey Hills newest collection of poems: Without Title, his new collection, combines the force and freedom of Hill's narrative verse with a renewed faith in his masterly talents for form and wordplay. The result is alarmingly good; a collection of lyrics on the difficulties of ageing, the problems of belief and the vagaries of language bracketing a sequence of pindarics in which Hill, ostensibly responding to thoughts of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, meditates at length on both their lives and considers the place of a poet in the world.?Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
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Hill was born on June 18, 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.
He graduated from Keble College, Oxford, in 1953, already the author of a pamphlet of poems that had attracted the notice of his Oxford contemporaries.
From 1954 until 1980 he taught at the University of Leeds and from 1981 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Though Hill was strongly influenced by the 17th-century metaphysical poets and by such English visionary poets as William Blake, his poetic strategies are distinctly modernist.
Like T. S. Eliot, he employs dramatic voices, historical collage, and encoded fictions (his "Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz, " a poem about sexual passion and despair, poses as a translation of the work of an apocryphal Spanish poet).
Typical of his style is "Funeral Music, " which broods on the ceremonial brutality of England's War of the Roses: "Once/Every Five hundred years a comet's/Over-riding stillness might reveal men/In such array, livid and featureless, /With England crouched beastwise beneath it all.
Hill's most richly strange work is Mercian Hymns, a series of 30 prose poems based on the historical King Offa who ruled in eighth-century Mercia.
Ancient, modern, and autobiographical details are mingled to evoke this powerful "creature of legend" who is still, in the poet's view, "the presiding genius of the West Midlands.
Hill's work are For the Unfallen (1959), King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles PéguyPeguy (1983). A book of his essays, The Lords of Limit, appeared in 1984.
( Praise for Geoffrey Hills newest collection of poems: ...)
(The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty y...)
(Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geof...)
( Geoffrey Hills poetry comprises one of the most uncomp...)
( This volume brings together poems from four decades of ...)
Hill was married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Whittaker, they had four children, Julian, Andrew, Jeremy and Bethany, ended in divorce. His second marriage to the American poet, and later Anglican priest, Alice Goodman occurred in 1987. The couple had a daughter, Alberta. The marriage lasted until Hill's death.