Some fifty years after its publication in 1971,

remains the taproot of Geoffrey Hill’s formidable oeuvre. These poems, none of which were published separately, were composed comparatively swiftly between 1968 and 1971 when Hill was teaching at the University of Leeds. Unlike the rest of Hill’s work, barring the posthumously published

(2017),

is written in prose, not verse – albeit prose differentiated from everyday discourse by its lyric torsion. Reviewers praised Hill’s further refining a poetic idiom notable for its “conciseness and richness of phrase” (Schmidt 14), but leavened this with comment on the volume’s eccentricity, which resisted easy summary or appraisal. Christopher Ricks – among the most…

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Citation: Sullivan, Diarmid. "Mercian Hymns". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 July 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9816, accessed 17 July 2025.]

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