Geoffrey Hill's Poetic Persona

I am re-reading Geoffrey Hill's poems to write an essay for a university journal

of poetics on the development of his poetic persona. I have been listening to

the recording of his reading at Oxford University in 2006 from all his books.

His strong reading voice is characterised by his idiosyncratic pitch and stress based on his breath. His stresses remind us of Dylan Thomas' but they are

less emphatic and more discreet. As he said himself: "I take my pitch catches

the emphasis /more by breathing than contagion."