[This entry was updated by Eleanor J. McNees (University of Denver) from the entry by Vincent B. Sherry, Jr. (Villanova University) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 166-179.]

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 patiently shaped five slim volumes since 1959, fashioning poems with the solidity, gravity, and finality of Roman inscriptions. His impulse toward technical experimentation, his concern...