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Geoffrey Hill

1932-

Profile

Poet, born at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire where he attended the local grammar school before going on to study English Language and literature at Oxford University in 1950. He followed an academic career, lecturing at Leeds from 1954, becoming Professor of English in 1977. He left Leeds in 1980 to taking on a fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before moving to Boston University in the U.S.A. in 1988.

He makes extensive use of thematic connection within his work. Mercian Hymns (1971) is an example of such a sequence of linked prose poems based around the story of the ancient kingdom of Mercia under King Offa, thus drawing upon his childhood memories of Worcestershire and beyond.

Works

Selected books by the author

The following works are available in the West Midlands Creative Literature Collection:-

King Log (1968)
Mercian hymns (1971)
Tenebrae (1978)
Collected poems (1985)

A selection of other books by the author:-

For the unfallen (1959)
The mystery of the charity of Charles Peguy (1983)
The enemy's country: Words, contextures, and other circumstances of language (1991)
Canaan (1996)

Background

The following books are available in the West Midlands Creative Literature Collection:-

Geoffrey Hill: essays on his work (1985) edited by Peter Robinson

Geoffrey Hill and the tongue's atrocities by Christopher Ricks (1978)

Geoffrey Hill Special Issue of Agenda, vol.17, no.1, Spring 1979. Contains the following essays:-

• An essay on Geoffrey Hills Tenebrae by Jeffrey Wainwright
• Geoffrey Hill's Tenebrae by John Peck
• "The pitch of attention": Geoffrey Hill's Tenebrae by W.S. Milne
• A retreat or seclusion; Tenebrae of Geoffrey Hill by John Bayley
• "Across a wilderness of retrospection": A reading of Geoffrey Hill's Lachrimae by Cathrael Kazin
• "Decreation" in Geoffrey Hill's Lachrimae by W.S. Milne
• Geoffrey Hill's "Funeral Music" by Merle Brown
• A note on Brand by William Cookson

Other sources of information:-

A tribute to Geoffrey Hill in Agenda, vol. 34, no. 2

The Complete Review website has brief biographical and bibliographical details on a Geoffrey Hill page, with reviews of individual works

The Literary Encyclopedia has a profile by Andrew M Roberts, University of Dundee

Page created 9 February 2001 and last updated 7 April 2005
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