Pericope of the Week: Geoffrey Hill

Looking a bit like Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Hill is one of our best poets. He is both beautifully descriptive and biblically prophetic.

While one can find a recent online picture of him standing cordially beside the current Archbishop of Canterbury, he acknowledges the "distance" that has grown between himself and the Church of England. Nevertheless he still confesses that he "adheres to certain old fashioned religious concepts such as the doctrine of original sin" and therefore has "been much influenced spiritually – not necessarily for the good-- by St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Karl Barth as well as the Hebrew prophets and the teachers of wisdom" (from a May 26, 2011 interview with The Oxford Student).

Geoffrey Hill

This week's pericope is a collection of excerpts from a brief online interview that Hill recently gave the Economist magazine. Earlier this month he appeared at that magazine's inaugural Books of the Year festival.









Click on this link and you'll be taken to that interview:
http://www.economist.com/multimedia?bclid=1213687636001&bctid=1306624228001


The above photo comes from The Oxford Student. For Hill's interview there, go to:
http://oxfordstudent.com/2011/05/26/interview-geoffrey-hill-oxford-professor-of-poetry/)