Geoffrey Hill is one of the finest and most important English-language poets of the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The subtlety, complexity and allusiveness of his work have prevented it from achieving the level of popularity of contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott, but it has been widely admired by fellow poets, by critics and by serious readers of poetry. He is a poet who divides opinion sharply between passionate admirers, for whom his now substantial oeuvre represents one of the great poetic achievements of the last hundred years, and those who find his style abrasive or his ideas unsympathetic. He is a poet in the modernist tradition, in the intense seriousness

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First published 01 October 2004 ; revised 11 January 2005

Citation: Roberts, Andrew Michael. "Geoffrey Hill". The Literary Encyclopedia. 1 October 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2138, accessed 9 February 2010.]