This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form. It aims to contribute something to the understanding of his poetry among those who have followed it for many years and students and other readers encountering this major poet for the first time.

SCENES FROM COMUS is the new sequence of poems from Britain's most original and ferocious modern prophet, Geoffrey Hill. In the words of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Hill remains for me the supreme voice of the last few decades The recent work, telegraphic, angry and unconsoled, at once assertive and self-dispossessing, is extraordinary'

More Dynamite anthologizes a wealth of essays by a writer with one of the keenest critical eyes of his generation. Craig Raine—poet, critic, novelist, Oxford don, and editor—turns his fearsome and unflinching gaze on subjects ranging from Kafka to Koons, Beckett to Babel. He waxes lyrical about Ron Mueck's hyperreal sculptures and reassesses the metafiction of David Foster Wallace. For Raine, no element of cultural output is insignificant, be it cinema, fiction, poetry, or installation art. Finding solace in both literature and art alike, and finding moments of truth and beauty where others had stopped looking, More Dynamite will reinvigorate readers, challenge our perceptions of the classics, and wonderfully affirm our love of good writing, new and old. This extensive collection of essays is a crash course in 20th century artistic endeavor—nothing short of a master class in high culture from one of the most discerning minds in contemporary British letters.

Introduction -- Contemporary British Poetry and Enigmaticalness -- Continuing 'Poetry Wars' in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry -- Committed and Autonomous Art -- Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment -- The Double Consciousness of Modernism -- Conclusion.

Geoffrey Hill’s poetry comprises one of the most uncompromising and visionary bodies of work written over the last fifty years. Imbued with the weight of history, morality, and language, his work reveals a deeply religious sensibility, a towering intellect, and an emotional complexity that are unrivaled in contemporary letters. Now, for the first time ever, readers can observe in one volume how Hill’s style took shape over time. This generous selection spans his career, beginning with poems from Hill’s astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, and following through to his stylistically distinct and critically acclaimed work Without Title. Including some of the poet’s strongest, most sensitive, and most brilliant pieces, this collection will reaffirm Hill’s reputation as “England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize.”

A collection of scholarly essays on Geoffrey Hill, including pioneering work by Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, which provides insights into the cultural, literary, political, and theological complexities of a figure thought by many to be the finest living English poet.