Geoffrey Hill: an English European
From the 1950s until his death last week, Geoffrey Hill was a poet as embedded in his continent as he was in his country
By Matthew Sperling
Last Thursday, on the eve of the centenary of the battle of the Somme, and with the nation drifting into constitutional crisis, the British poet Geoffrey Hill died aged 84. His career spanned more than 60 years, and no writer in our time has been as eloquent as him on matters of collective memory and on the dubious patrimony of Englishness. Hill was “forever tangling with England/in her quiet ways of betrayal”, as he put it in a section of his poem “The Orchards of Syon” (2003) which seeks to balance “recollection” and “rage” in the accounts:
Debit the lot to our chequered country,
crediting even so her haunted music.
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