May/June 2004

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"I think Geoffrey Hill is probably the best writer alive," A. N. Wilson has written, "in prose or rhyme, in the English language." Michael Dirda confines his judgment to the realm of verse, but disdains qualification: "Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living English poet." And Peter Levi adds to Dirda's assertion a jutting insistence: "Geoffrey Hill must by now be indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world."

At least Levi's "perhaps" gives us room to dissent from the global judgment. But "indisputably" was surely unwise—what word could better guarantee dispute? Indeed, it is the nature of such claims to invite demurrals, counter-claims, refutations. But they also command attention, and perhaps that is what Wilson, Dirda, and Levi wanted above all, since many otherwise quite literate people do not know the work of Geoffrey Hill.

Hill was born in England in 1932, but has lived for 15 years now in the United States, where he is professor of literature and religion at Boston University. Between 1959 and 1992 he published five slender volumes of verse, plus a New and Collected Poems (the new ones being rather few), and an extraordinary collection of essays, The Lords of Limit. Especially in his first four books, Hill's poems are rather consistent in their tone and their resources: they combine a fascination for the Latinate with a deep, deep immersion in the early centuries of the Anglo-Saxon Christian world. (Of a set of poems called "Funeral Music," Hill wrote, "In this sequence I was attempting a florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks.") One of Hill's finest achievements is surely the sequence of prose poems called Mercian Hymns (1971), which call forth the long-forgotten 8th-century world of ...