Are you there, God? It’s me, Geoffrey Hill.

In “Uphill both ways,” Josh Wilson at the New Republic deconstructs English poet Geoffrey Hill’s depiction of all things God-related--sacrifice, creation, the sins of the father and Hill as the poet-martyr--and finds Hill "is no stranger to the idea of godlessness, but godlessness is a stranger in Hill’s poetry":

If Hill is making himself into a god-king and “martyrologist” in his first three books, both imaginatively and with his religiously pristine forms, in the latter ten he offers that god-king as a ritual sacrifice by becoming a kind of poetic martyr himself. Tenebrae gives us both the world of innocence, justice, and love worth saving (as in the elegantly simple “The Pentecost Castle”) and the salvific sacrifice. For instance, in the sonnet “Martyrium,” we are given the martyrdom of “the Jesus-faced man walking crowned with flies” who is not necessarily Jesus himself, who recalls the poet-creator of Hill’s “Genesis,” and whose mouth is “unstitched into a rimless cup,” a metaphor for the mouth-Grail of the poet-martyr and its promise of salvation-by-blood, here the lifeblood of poetry, the Logos.

The core of Hill’s project—to deify imaginatively the poetic self in preparation for self-sacrifice that the sins of the father may be absolved—strikes us, however beautiful its execution, as antiquated and hubristic. In his prodigality and his pride, Hill has annexed the universal of shared historical memory to the personal. He does not care that tight lips keep out readers. Maybe he is reader enough . . .