Abstract/Summary

This article considers the technical features which Geoffrey Hill has appropriated from his precursor John Milton. These features enabled Hill to evolve a poetics, in his recent work, which is cognizant of the formal possibilities of modernism, but which overcomes their political and cultural dangers. Hill's Miltonic poetics, alternatively, offer a politics, and ultimately a metaphysics, which understands fine distinctions, and specific unities, between its often recalcitrant materials. While drawing upon Hill's critical responses to Milton, the article also deploys materials from the archive to consider the cruxes out of which some of Hill's recent work has found its instigation.