‘What are you incinerating?’: Geoffrey Hill and Popular Culture

Hill is a notoriously difficult, densely allusive poet and critics are too ready to conflate difficulty and political conservatism. Yet even a partial and random list reveals the remarkable extent to which future editors and annotators of Hill's work will have, in the case of a poet nonetheless accused of being reactionary and elitist, to address working class and popular culture. While Tony Harrison makes much of the inarticulacy of the working classes, Geoffrey Hill seems truer to his and their linguistic hypersensitivity and to the fraught entanglement of language, silence and violence.