Geoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in the English language. The essays gathered in this book present a number of new contexts in which to explore a wide range of his writings, from the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the recent volumes A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) and Collected Critical Writings (2008). Connections are made between the early and the later poetry, and between the poetry and the criticism, and archival materials are considered along with the published texts. The essays also make comparisons across disciplines, discussing...

Interviewed in 1966, Geoffrey Hill said, 'Language contains everything you want - history, sociology, economics: it is a kind of drama of human destiny'. This book shows how the work of one of the major post-war writers in English has been charged by a mythological sense of language's historical drama, by reading the whole body of Hill's poetry from sixty years against a tradition of visionary poet-philologists that he himself has delineated. That line runs from the present-day editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Chenevix Trench in the Victorian...