Biography Essay

Geoffrey Hill is a poet with a capacity for paradox. He combines the two opposing tendencies of British verse in the postwar period, displaying an excellent formal control, like the Movement poets of the 1950s, and an awareness of the violence of language in relation to history, like Ted Hughes and others writing since the 1960s. But Hill has lived largely apart from the public world of literary trends, lecturing and writing as an academic on subjects ranging from Renaissance literature to the religious dimensions of art. A solitary perfectionist, he has fashioned poems with the solidity, gravity, and finality of Roman inscriptions. His impulse toward technical experimentation, his concern with history and religion, his touches of cosmopolitan irony: these are the traits of a neomodernist poetry that is complex, richly allusive, formally innovative.

Geoffrey William Hill was born to William George and Hilda Beatrice Hands...