Geoffrey Hill’s Complex Affinities with American Agrarian Poetry

This article traces the long period of empathy that the English modernist poet Geoffrey Hill has displayed towards the poets associated with the Agrarian movement in America from the 1920s to the 1950s. Although this is in many ways an unlikely transatlantic association, the Agrarians, and particularly Allen Tate, have shaped Hill’s response to the High Modernist ‘moment’, as well as his ‘stance’ as poet towards the culture and politics of his times. The association between Hill and the Agrarian poets continues to this day, as exemplified by his recent lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, and by the revisions to his earlier poetry evident in the recent Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012.