for the British aeronautical engineer and professor, see Geoffrey T. R. Hill Professor Geoffrey T.R. Hill was a British aeronautical engineer. ...

Geoffrey Hill (born June 18, 1932) is an English poet, professor of English Literature and religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, Massachusetts, USA. is the 169th day of the year (170th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1932 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the English as a nation. ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V.S... For similarly-named academic institutions, see Boston (disambiguation). ... This article is about the U.S. State. ...

Biography

Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England, in 1932. When he was six, his family moved to nearby Fairfield, part of Worcestershire, where he attended the local primary school, then the grammar school in Bromsgrove. 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 edited by Donald Davie (however before that he'd been published in the Oxford Guardian—magazine of the University Liberal Club—and The Isis). , Bromsgrove is a town in Worcestershire, England. ... Worcestershire (pronounced ; abbreviated Worcs) is a county located in the West Midlands region of central England. ... For other uses, see England (disambiguation). ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1932 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... College name Keble College Collegium Keblense Named after John Keble Established 1870 Sister College Selwyn College Warden Professor Dame Averil Cameron DBE FBA JCR President Paul Dwyer Undergraduates 435 MCR President Tom Robinson Graduates 219 Homepage Boatclub Keble College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford... Year 1952 (MCMLII) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Fantasy Press was an American publishing house specialising in fantasy and science fiction titles. ... Donald Alfred Davie (1922-1995) was an English poet and critic. ... Isis is the longest-running independent student magazine in England, established in 1892 at the University of Oxford. ...

Upon graduating 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 take up the position he currently holds as University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. As of 2006, he moved back to England, and is now living in Cambridge. The University of Oxford (usually abbreviated as Oxon. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research university, one of the largest in the United Kingdom with over 32,000 full-time students. ... The University of Bristol is a university in Bristol, England. ... of the Emmanuel College College name Emmanuel College Named after Jesus Christ (Emmanuel) Established 1584 Location St Andrews Street Admittance Men and women Master The Lord Wilson of Dinton Undergraduates 500 Graduates 100 Sister college Exeter College, Oxford College Website Boat Club Wesite Emmanuel front court and the Wren...

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. of the Emmanuel College College name Emmanuel College Named after Jesus Christ (Emmanuel) Established 1584 Location St Andrews Street Admittance Men and women Master The Lord Wilson of Dinton Undergraduates 500 Graduates 100 Sister college Exeter College, Oxford College Website Boat Club Wesite Emmanuel front court and the Wren... The Royal Society of Literature is the senior literary organisation in Britain. External link The Royal Society of Literature Categories: Literature stubs | Literature of the United Kingdom ... The House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Alice Goodman is the wife of noted poet Geoffrey Hill. ...

Writing

Hill is, by the majority of critics, considered to be one of the more distinguished poets of his generation. Set apart from contemporary 'Movement' writers of the 1950s, and seemingly uninfluenced by writers of subsequent decades, Hill's poetry encompasses a variety of styles, from the dense and allusive writing of King Log (1968) or Canaan (1997) to the simplified syntax of the sequence 'The Pentecost Castle' in Tenebrae (1978) to the more accessible poems of Mercian Hymns (1971), one of his best selling books, a series of thirty poems (sometimes called 'prose-poems' a label which Hill rejects in favour of 'versets'^[1]) 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. The Movement was a term coined by J. D. Scott, literary editor of the Spectator, in 1954 to describe a group of writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Alfred Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... Offa (died July 26/29, 796) was the King of Mercia from 757 until his death. ... (7th century — 8th century — 9th century — other centuries) Events The Iberian peninsula is taken by Arab and Berber Muslims, thus ending the Visigothic rule, and starting almost 8 centuries of Muslim presence there. ... The Kingdom of Mercia at its greatest extent (7th to 9th centuries) is shown in green, with the original core area (6th century) given a darker tint. ... The West Midlands is an official Region of England, covering the western half of the Midlands. ...

Hill is often described, in reference both to his style and subject, as a difficult, demanding poet. He makes circumspect use of traditional rhetoric (as well as that of modernism), but he also (especially in the late work) transcribes the idioms of public life, such as those of television, politics (its sloganeering) and punditry. For matter, Hill has been drawn to morally problematic and violent episodes in British and European history, though it should be noted that his accounts of landscape (especially that of his native Worcestershire) are charged with the same intensity as his encounters with history. (He has written perhaps the most important poetic responses to the Holocaust in English, 'Two Formal Elegies', 'September Song' and 'Ovid in the Third Reich'.) In an interview in The Paris Review (2000), where 'Genesis' was published when he was still at Oxford, Hill defended the right of poets to difficulty as one form of resistance to the demeaning and profitable simplifications imposed by 'maestros of the world'; elsewhere he's argued that as what's difficult is democratic, so demand for simplicity is characteristic of tyrants. Hill's distaste for conclusion however has led him, in 2000's Speech! Speech!, to scorn the latter argument as something of a glib get-out. Indeed, throughout his corpus it is impressed upon the reader that Hill, a palpably gifted lyrist, is uncomfortable with the muffling and fudges of truth-telling that verse designed to sound well, for its contrivances of harmony, must permit. The constant buffets of Hill's suspicion or scrupulous wariness of lyric eloquence—can it truly be eloquent?—against his powerful 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 ones of prose-like academese and inscrutable syntax. Such subtle unrest ends up dramatising Hill's real condition (of which we learn in the long interview collected in Haffenden's Viewpoints): that of the poet warring himself to witness honestly, to make language, that tool for whose lyric use his aptitude may be unfortunate, say truly what he believes is true of the world. For other uses, see Holocaust (disambiguation) and Shoah (disambiguation). ... // The Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine based in New York City. ... Professor John Haffenden was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA, MA) and Oxford University (D.Phil), Haffenden is an academic at the University of Sheffield, where his renowned research on William Empson developed. ...

Controversy and Parody

The violence of Hill's aesthetic has been criticised by the Irish poet-critic Tom Paulin, who draws attention to the poet's use of the Virgilian 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 often seem to draw their energies from an outmoded nationalism expressed in what Hugh Haughton has described as a 'petrified language largely invented by the Victorians'. ^{[citation needed]} And yet Hill's worldwide reputation exceeds that of any other living British poet; Harold Bloom has called him 'the strongest British poet now active.' ^{[citation needed]} Thomas Neilson Paulin (born January 25, 1949 in Leeds, England) is a Northern Irish poet and critic well-known for his strong political views. ... Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC), later called Virgilius, and known in English as Virgil or Vergil, was a classical Roman poet, the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics [commonly but less correctly called the Eclogues], the Georgics and the substantially completed Aeneid... Simon Heffers biography of Enoch Powell, published in 1999 John Enoch Powell, MBE (June 16, 1912 – February 8, 1998) was a British politician, linguist, writer, academic, soldier and poet. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Hill's unmistakable style has been subject to parody: Wendy Cope includes a parody of a 'Mercian Hymn' in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. Wendy Cope (born July 21, 1945) is a contemporary English poet. ...

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)
• Without Title (2006)
• Selected Poems (2006)
• A Treatise of Civil Power (2005; 2007)

Without Title is a book of poems by Geoffrey Hill. ...

Essays

• The Lords of Limit (1984)
• The Enemy's Country (1991)
• Style and Faith (2003)
• Collected Critical Writings (2008)

Footnotes

1. ^ In 'An Interview' with John Haffenden Hill remarks: "They're versets of rhythmical prose. The rhythm and cadence are far more of tuned chant than I think one normally associates with the prose poem. I designed the appearance on the page in the form of versets." See also: Elisabeth Mary Knottenbelt, Passionate Intelligence: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, p. 190

Professor John Haffenden was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA, MA) and Oxford University (D.Phil), Haffenden is an academic at the University of Sheffield, where his renowned research on William Empson developed. ...

External links

• [1] Faculty Page at Boston University
• [2] Geoffrey Hill Study Centre
• [3] The Geoffrey Hill Server
• [4] Guardian profile of Hill, celebrating his 70th birthday
• [5] Hill on the 'beautiful energy' of his poetry
• [6] Criticism and a little praise of Hill's poetry in "Subduing the reader" by Laurie Smith in Magma, No. 23, Summer 2002