Geoffrey Hill was 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 was a poet who divided 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 was a poet in the modernist tradition, in the intense seriousness with which he views the poet's task, in his…

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Citation: Roberts, Andrew Michael. "Geoffrey Hill". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 October 2004; last revised 24 May 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2138, accessed 19 March 2024.]

2138 Geoffrey Hill 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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