Skip to content

Geoffrey Hill, 1932-2016.

By TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS [DAILY TELEGRAPH] — One of Hill’s formative early memories was the sight German bombers flying over his home town of Bromsgrove. “Here were these peculiar, businesslike – sinisterly businesslike – winged things… I can still remember the peculiar frisson of it,” he told The Telegraph in 2013. “Strange as it sounds that incident – which can’t have lasted more than a minute and a half – has dictated for the rest of my life the way I have perceived certain juxtapositions of the real and the surreal. One is simultaneously terrified, appalled and curiously detached. Which is as good a description of a poem as I can think of.”

CN150excerptHe was a particularly revered figure among poets. “He would make a magnificent poet laureate,” said Seamus Heaney in 2009. “He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.”

“However,” the Nobel Prize-winner added, “his poems show an acute distress at the falling away of standards – cultural and political. I think because of that he wouldn’t want the job.”


Continued at the Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
jack belck
jack belck
7 years ago

They write from relentless confusion,hoping to put to paper what eludes them, resorting to word
entanglements as distraction from their restlessness, perhaps awaiting reviews to learn what they had said.

1
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x