The work of Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) often provokes bemusement or even hostility; however, he was often referred to as ‘the greatest living poet’ and variants thereof. Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2010-2015, Hill published in 2013 his collected poems, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, which included four previously-unpublished collections and substantial expansions and revisions of existing works, and in 2008 published his Collected Critical Writings, a volume comprising all his published criticism and two new major collections of essays, Inventions of Value and Alienated Majesty. This book sets this later work – from 1996 to 2016 – in its contexts. Providing exegetical and interpretive readings of this work, it reflects, and refracts, its dazzling radiance, setting it within its literary, cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts, and bringing it to specialists on Hill and modern poetry and to a wider audience.
