Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:
In 1999, nearly a decade after he first devoted himself to poetry, Phillips drove through a blizzard to interview the poet Geoffrey Hill. The esteemed, Oxford-educated, English poet had been Phillips’s teacher at Boston University. When In the Blood was published, Phillips left his teaching position and returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in classical philology. His second time there was brief. Deciding instead to study poetry with Robert Pinsky, Phillips entered the single-year MA program at Boston University.
There, Phillips enrolled in Hill’s “The Poetry of Religion” course, where he first read George Herbert, John Donne, and two Jesuit priests: Robert Southwell and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hill revered the Elizabethan Jesuits. When he offered a seminar on Hopkins the next semester, Phillips enrolled. He only had one other classmate.
Hill was a “formidable” teacher, Phillips recalled. The three-hour classes included “having to recite memorized Hopkins poems to [Hill], being loudly corrected at each mispronunciation.”
more here.
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