Geoffrey Hill | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Geoffrey William Hill (1932-06-18)18 June 1932 Bromsgrove,Worcestershire, England |
| Died | 30 June 2016(2016-06-30) (aged 84) Cambridge,Cambridgeshire, England |
| Occupation | Poet, Writer, Professor of English Literature |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism |
| Spouse | Alice Goodman |
| Children | 5 |
Sir Geoffrey William Hill,FRSL (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of theEditorial Institute, atBoston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language."[1][2] From 2010 to 2015 he held the position ofProfessor of Poetry in theUniversity of Oxford.[3] Following his receiving theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for hisCollected Critical Writings, and the publication ofBroken Hierarchies (Poems 1952–2012), Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Geoffrey Hill was born inBromsgrove,Worcestershire,England, in 1932, the son of a police constable. When he was six, his family moved to nearbyFairfield inWorcestershire, 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."[4] On these walks he often carried with himOscar 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."[citation needed]
In 1950, he was admitted toKeble College, Oxford, to read English, where he published his first poems in 1952, at the age of twenty, in an eponymousFantasy Press volume (though he had published work in theOxford Guardian—the magazine of theUniversity Liberal Club—andThe Isis).
Upon graduation fromOxford with afirst, Hill embarked on an academic career, teaching at theUniversity of Leeds from 1954 until 1980, from 1976 asprofessor ofEnglish Literature. After leaving Leeds, he spent a year at theUniversity of Bristol on a Churchill Scholarship before becoming a teaching fellow atEmmanuel College, Cambridge, where he taught from 1981 until 1988.
He then moved to theUnited States, to serve asUniversity Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. In 2000, withChristopher Ricks, he was co-founder of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, dedicated to training students in editorial method. In 2006, he moved back to Cambridge, England.
Hill was aChristian.[5] He died in Cambridge on 30 June 2016.[6]
Hill was married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Whittaker, which produced four children, Julian, Andrew, Jeremy and Bethany, ended in divorce. His second marriage to the American librettist, and Anglican priest,Alice Goodman occurred in 1987. The couple had a daughter, Alberta. The marriage lasted until Hill's death.[7]
Mercian Hymns won theAlice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the inauguralWhitbread Award for Poetry in 1971. Hill won as well theEric Gregory Award in 1961.[citation needed]
Hill delivered the 1998Warton Lecture on English Poetry.[8]
Hill was awarded an honoraryD.Litt. degree by the University of Leeds in 1988, the same year he received anIngram Merrill Foundation Award. He was also anHonorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; an Honorary Fellow ofEmmanuel College, Cambridge; a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature; and a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2009, hisCollected Critical Writings won theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.[9]
Hill was created aKnight Bachelor in the 2012New Year Honours for services to literature.[10]
In March 2010 Hill was confirmed as a candidate in the election of theProfessor of Poetry in theUniversity of Oxford, with a broad base of academic support.[11][12] He was ultimately successful, and delivered his 15 lectures in the academic years 2010 to 2015.[3][13] The lectures progressed chronologically, beginning withShakespeare's sonnets and concluding with a critique ofPhilip Larkin's poem "Church Going".
Hill's poetry encompasses a variety of styles, from the dense and allusive writing ofKing Log (1968) andCanaan (1997) through the simplified syntax of the sequence "The Pentecost Castle" inTenebrae (1978), on to the more accessible poems ofMercian Hymns (1971), a series of 30 poems (sometimes called "prose-poems", a label which Hill rejects in favour of "versets")[14] which juxtapose the history ofOffa, eighth-century ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom ofMercia, with Hill's own childhood in the modern Mercia of theWest Midlands.Seamus Heaney said of Hill: "He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain."[15]
Kenneth Haynes, editor ofBroken Hierarchies, commented: "the annotation is not the hard part with Hill's poems... the difficulty only begins after looking things up".[16] Elegy is Hill's dominant mode; he is a poet of phrases rather than cadences.[17] Regarding both his style and subject, Hill is often described as a "difficult" poet. In an interview inThe 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 was consistently drawn to morally problematic and violent episodes in British and European history and has written poetic responses to theHolocaust 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 has also worked in theatre – in 1978, theNational Theatre inLondon staged his 'version for the English stage' ofBrand byHenrik Ibsen, written in rhyming verse. Hill's distaste for conclusion, however, has led him, in 2000'sSpeech! Speech! (118), to scorn the following argument as a glib get-out: 'ACCESSIBLE / traded asDEMOCRATIC, 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 trulybe eloquent?—against his talent for it (inSyon, 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 inHaffenden'sViewpoints 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.[18]
The violence of Hill's aesthetic has been criticised by the Irish poet-criticTom Paulin, who draws attention to the poet's use of theVirgilian trope of 'rivers of blood' – as deployed infamously byEnoch 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 whatHugh Haughton has described as a 'language of the past largely invented by the Victorians'.[19] Yet as Raphael Ingelbien notes, "Hill's England ... is a landscape which is fraught with the traces of a history that stretches so far back that it relativizes the Empire and its aftermath".[20]Harold Bloom has called him "the strongest British poet now active."[1]
For his part, Hill addressed some of the misperceptions about his political and cultural beliefs in aGuardian interview in 2002. There he suggested that his affection for the "radical Tories" 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".[21]
Hill's style has been subjected to parody:Wendy Cope includes a two-stanza parody of theMercian Hymns entitled "Duffa Rex" inMaking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis published byFaber & Faber.
