Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Moral Landscape’

This article examines the peculiar complexity of Geoffrey Hill’s brand of ‘nature poetry’, with its double sense of materiality and the immaterial, and with its tendency to fuse first-hand, visually-prompted observations with elements of historical, cultural, national, mythological, theological and psychological awareness. Much of the analysis in the article responds to a tension between one’s sense that Hill’s topographies are richly, expressively realised locales and one’s recognition that the poet is preoccupied with the difficulty – perhaps even the delusion – of rendering the phenomenal world in language.