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“... Kipling is the same. Ortheris and Mulvaney, like Parnesius the Roman centurion in Puck of Pook’s Hill, speak no language: which is why their casual informed references, their offhand expertise, their sententiousness and sentiment, blend together in ways which so many people of the same sort recognise and even begin internally to adopt. Hemingway learnt from ...”

“... tightly reined and rather academic poet moved by imagery of kirk and court, rather like a Scottish Geoffrey Hill: Day updawis, shaddois flee Be thou as the Hairt tae me Upon the high hill Bethery Blintering floor o’ Sharon’s rose Like glaur and stoor warld’s glory goes Tae haud nor bield it nae man knows ... For ...”

“... of any UK publisher to collect Cox’s criticism to his ‘fierce repudiation of the well-regarded Geoffrey Hill’. On Bunting, it is worth quoting Davie at some length: The deeply ingrained Englishness of Briggflatts has to be insisted on, because British insularity has sometimes tried to push Bunting into the margin by representing him as a rootless ...”

“... to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what ...”

“... notorious.’ There is a fine, cautious, detailed review of volumes of verse by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill; there are notes on Ford Madox Ford, Saint-John Perse and many others. And above all there is a beautiful, puzzled essay on Cavafy in which Auden, who firmly believes you need to know his or her language, and perhaps even be a native ...”

“... about family and school. Born at Gospel Oak, Betjeman moved up with his parents to better-off West Hill; fans will remember his touching invocation of the house there (‘Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill!’), as well as some very subtle verses (‘Lissenden Mansions! And my memory sifts/Lilies from lily-like electric ...”

“... who’d spent years carefully tracking and tracing the continuities between Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day ...”

“... from reading such German memoirs as had begun to appear, came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective ...”

“... of indebtedness comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a rewrite of Slinger. Perhaps because our own Romantic tap-root is in place, Stevens’s predicament seems more analogous than formative. Moreover, the analogy is not exact. For while the post-Stevens US lyric (as ...”

“... At a time when, in English poetry, we are often asked to admire the agonised perfectionism of a Geoffrey Hill or a Donald Davie, with its inbuilt grunts of effort, it is worth considering the perfection, tout simple, of Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?’ she asked herself on first ...”

“... Pygge was outrageous. Pygge attacked everybody, mercilessly.I remember a very funny take-off of Geoffrey Hill. Written by you, I believe. It was called ‘The Hallstein Gospel’. An accompanying note claimed it had been found on a crumpled scrap of paper outside the poet’s window. He had discarded it, the note said, because it was ‘too cravenly ...”

“... He also disliked the other top scientists already on the committee, Patrick Blackett and A.V. Hill, who disliked him in return. The atmosphere got so bad that, after little more than a year, Blackett and Hill resigned and Tizard said he, too, would resign unless Lindemann were removed. The committee did some good ...”

“... that there might be some doubt about its authenticity. Much of the phenomenon must be ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Born some thirty years after the Norman Conquest, Geoffrey, with his Norman name and strong Welsh connections, was probably the child of a mixed marriage. His achievement was to inject old Celtic tradition ...”

“... straight or that one has the necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a prerequisite.’) Geoffrey Grigson, so much older than Gunn (he is 77), has of course built his career about being considered impertinent, so it’s not surprising to find in his latest collection (his first was in 1939) runovers like these: So mud was on you that day. So it was ...”

“... publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable food?’). Part of the impact of Kenner’s ...”