ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Hill's dense, formal, formidable poems have gradually established themselves, though he is still much less well known than he should be among ordinary readers of poetry. In an early essay on Hill's work, Christopher Ricks demonstrated the way in which Geoffrey Hill uses casual phrases and dead metaphors so that they are 'rinsed and restored', as 'like nothing on earth' is treated in the line just quoted. The thirty prose poems that make up Mercian Hymns centre on the eighth-century king of the West-Midlands, Offa, but the effort here is not towards the re-creation of the past as it was with 'Funeral Music'. If Mercian Hymns has any stylistic source other than the historical sources to which Hill's notes make droll and learned references, it may be partly in St-John Perse's Anabasis, which T. S. Eliot translated and published in 1931, and partly in David Jones; but really the method and tone are like nothing else in English.
