Tinnitus aurium: Hearing Hill’s Eliot

Following Geoffrey Hill’s assertion that ‘Little Gidding’ suffers from ‘a kind of semantic tinnitus aurium’, it is possible to understand his career-long engagement with T. S. Eliot as an exploration of sound and hearing. This essay focuses in particular on King Log and Mercian Hymns, demonstrating how Hill’s ear for semantic ‘pitch’ implicitly disrupts and unpicks Eliot’s late style, thereby revealing Hill’s richly contrasting poetics of nationhood.