The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Old Members at Work
The College at Large
Confessio Amantis
Leafing through books of reference in recent years I
occasionally find statements such as the following: ‘Since
graduating from Keble College, Oxford, in 1953, Geoffrey Hill
has pursued a threefold career as university teacher, critic and
poet’.
Geoffrey Hill, MA (Hon.
D.Litt., Leeds; Hon. D.Litt.,
Warwick). FRSL, Honorary
Fellow
I certainly acknowledge that I have spent a lifetime in university
teaching, I retired in 2006 after fifty-two years in the profession:
first at Leeds (26 years), then at Cambridge (8 years), latterly at
Boston University, Massachusetts (18 years): a length of service,
which, if not breaking a record, must surely be within striking
distance of one.
I suppose I would quibble with the conventional term ‘pursue’.
Undeniably and (in more than one sense) I lived through
a career in university teaching; whether I actively pursued
it is another matter. I would say rather that I arrived in it,
a gauchely ill-prepared twenty-two year old, did the work
required of me for half a century, and departed from it at the
age of seventy-four.
Viewed eccentrically my greatest achievement over fifty years
was in not being ground down creatively by the profession,
one in which I nonetheless laboured, under obedience, with
great thoroughness and indeed dedication. My literary archive,
housed at the University of Leeds, contains in addition to
seventy closely worked poetry notebooks almost two hundred
unpublished academic lectures written out in full in typescript
and longhand; and they represent only a fraction of the tasks
performed. Why should one not say these things?
A friend to whom I showed an earlier version of this paper
asked why I had said so little about my classroom teaching. I
replied that, having turned the matter over with some care, I
had decided, rather to my surprise, that there was relatively
little that I wished to say or indeed could effectively say. At
his urging, however, I subsequently put a number of blunt
questions to myself. Did I like my students? On the whole
yes, very much so; though the relatively small number of
scoundrels encountered looms disproportionately large in my
recollection. Did I prefer teaching British students to American,
or vice versa? The very different pedagogic disciplines (if that
is still a valid term) to which students of the two nations are
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