Thanks to Baroque in Hackney for finding this Interview with Geoffrey Hill in the Oxonian Review.
For someone with a reputation for forbiddingly serious poetry, its nice to see he doesn’t take himself too seriously:
How do you envisage your own poetry’s readership?
Impossible to say. When I see my half-yearly royalties statements I seem not to have a readership at all.
And there’s a wonderful description of his discovery of poetry:
I became a poet because at the age of ten or thereabouts … I fell in love with English poetry. I was brought up in a Worcestershire village where my father was the local bobby. I sang in the church choir and attended Sunday school. And that year my good attendance prize was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Poetry, a Victorian bestseller. I might be impatient, even scornful now of some of its preferences, but to a boy of ten, it was a revelation and an initiation. From then until now there has been no escape … the first reaction was total unjudgemental love.
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Occasionally I come across a Geoffrey Hill poem I can understand. “What is there in my heart that you should sue” transformed my winter solstice. It’s well worth learning by heart.
Careful – “Understanding is the booby prize.”
Seriously – great choice of poem.