Geoffrey Hill is arguably our greatest post-war poet. Over the past 50 years he has produced searching, searing work on England's troubled history, the Holocaust,
He should be read for many generations after [his contemporaries] have blended together, just as he should survive all but a handful (or fewer) of American poets now active." His newest poems include a massive commemoration of Winston Churchill, an elegy on the death of William Arrowsmith, and a beautiful mysterious lyric, entitled "Respublica," reflecting on the nature of public existence.

Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power, Hill planted the seeds of style and concern that he has continued to cultivate over his long career. Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy. In early collections such as King Log (1968) and Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought “to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,” according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. “He deals with violent public events. … Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.”



From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/geoffrey-hill: