geoffrey hill

Geoffrey Hill (b. June 18, 1932) - British poet, Professor of English Literature and Religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University.

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. 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.

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.

Bibliography

Poetry

For the Unfallen (1958)
King Log (1968)
Mercian Hymns (1971)
Tenebrae (1978)
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pguy (1983)
New and Collected Poems (1994)
Canaan (1997)
The Triumph of Love (1998)
Speech! Speech! (2000)
The Orchards of Syon (2002)
Scenes from Comus (forthcoming, Feb 2005)

Essays

The Lords of Limit (1984)
The Enemy's Country (1991)
Style and Faith (2003)

Links

Hill, Geoffrey Hill, Geoffrey

<< Previous

Word Browser

Next >>

kitasaku district, nagano
maruko, nagano
nagato, nagano
sanada, nagano
takeshi, nagano
lyudmila georgievna karachkina
black bulbul
fallen angels (movie)
wada, nagano
fallen angels (novel)
block party

aoki, nagano
chiisagata district, nagano
shimosuwa, nagano
fujimi, nagano
flinders island
hara, nagano
gemini jets
suwa district, nagano
takato, nagano
tatsuno, nagano
gr footpath

minowa, nagano
russell simmons
nickel deposits of finland
iijima, nagano
dextrocardia
minamiminowa, nagano
nakagawa, nagano
counties in new zealand
hase, nagano
miyada, nagano
macquarie

edith cowan
kamiina district, nagano
celebration
matsukawa, nagano
takamori, nagano
ulrike meyfarth
anan, nagano
seinaiji, nagano
achi, nagano
namiai, nagano
hiraya, nagano