Introduction

Summary

When Geoffrey Hill began his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2011, the audience members clearly expected a mischievous performance. They were not disappointed: nervous laughter greeted the semi-comic irascibility of his declaration that, as someone ‘seven months short of eighty’, he had a ‘rule’ to exasperate. In his first lecture a year earlier, Hill had promised a future evaluation of contemporary British poetry, and in the subsequent oration he did not hold back, appraising creative writing as a neoliberal efflorescence of a doomed literary culture, with its ‘plethora of literary prizes’ and false evaluation of its own salubriousness. Anti-élitist ‘accessibility’ was the buzz word du jour, Hill argued in 2010, but ‘accessible’ should be reserved as an adjective for supermarkets or public lavatories, he added dryly, not as a value judgement in a discussion of poetry and poetics.