‘THE CRUX OF THE WHOLE THING’: GEOFFREY HILL’S ANNOTATED COPY OF Night Thoughts

Red cloth-effect paper binding over boards; very good in a near very good jacket, chipped along the top edge of the front panel. Hill’s blue biro ownership inscription to the front flyleaf; annotated early on with a system of black biro crosses, exclamation marks and maringal lines; there are references to other texts and poets in the annotation: ‘New Road p188’, Roger Roughton, Hart Crane and T S Eliot. Gascoyne’s description of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern) is ‘symptomatic’ for Hill (p24 outer margin with extensive asterisking). He passes the comment ‘See below; if only the rest were as true to itself as this’ (p42) and finally ‘The crux of the whole thing???’ (p46) This is an example of one poet reading the work of another very different writer with great care and respect.