September 8, 2000For Immediate Release
Contact: Beth Bargar, Director of Public Relations (704) 825-6890
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Boston University Poet to Receive T.S. Eliot Award in Belmont, NC
BELMONT, NC - Geoffrey Hill, a prolific poet and essayist, especially in the English traditions of moral and historical awareness, will receive the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing presented by the Ingersoll Foundation of Rockford, IL during a symposium Sept. 23 at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. Since 1999 the Ingersoll Awards have been administered by the Bradley Institute for the Study of Christian Culture at Belmont Abbey College.
The prizes, which each include an award of $25,000 for the recipient, include the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing and the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, presented last fall to Robert Conquest, D.Litt, a historian and scholar of Soviet-era politics.
The Sept. 23 symposium will begin at 1:30 p.m. and will conclude with a dinner address by Geoffrey Hill. Also speaking during the day will be Christopher Ricks, William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, where he is co-director with Hill of The Editorial Institute; and poet David Yezzi, former associate editor of The New Criterion and author of the new poetry chapbook Sad Is Eros, published in June 2000 by Aralia Press. The master of ceremonies will be Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.
Information on attending the symposium is available from the Bradley Institute, (704) 829-7231.
The prize recipient, Geoffrey Hill, is Professor of Literature and Religion and co-director of The Editorial Institute at Boston University. He has written widely on the virtues of conscientiousness and morality and is the author of numerous books and essays. His newest book, Speech! Speech! is to be published Nov. 1 by Counterpoint Press.
He was born in 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worchester, England and is a fellow of Emmanuel College in Cambridge, England. Hill is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous awards for his work.
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The Ingersoll Prizes
"Order in society may be renewed through order in humane letters and order in scholarship, God willing." This was Russell Kirk's description of the purpose of The Ingersoll Prizes when he accepted the Richard M. Weaver Award in 1984. Dr. Kirk went on to speak of his two old friends for whom the prizes were named, T.S. Eliot and Richard M. Weaver: They "woke the imagination and the right reason of the better minds and consciences of this era."
In establishing The Ingersoll Prizes, the directors of The Ingersoll Foundation were making a bold statement: that culture was more important than politics, that ideas count for more than issues, and that the health of a society can more easily be measured by the quality of its thought than by its GNP. In the initial statement of purpose, the Foundation declared its support for such permanent values as "truth, faith, integrity, reason, conscience, tradition." In awarding these prizes it has been the intention to honor those writers who have exemplified these values, whether they have been poets, novelists, theologians, historians, or social theorists.
The Ingersoll Foundation has chosen The Bradley Institute for the Study of Christian Culture at Belmont Abbey College to administer the prestigious Ingersoll Prizes in Literature and Humanities. These prizes - The Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing - were established in 1983 to recognize authors whose works address the themes of honor and virtue in society. Both prizes formerly were awarded in Chicago.
The Bradley Institute was chosen to administer the prizes in part because of its own commitment to the values the prizes seek to support: "truth, faith, integrity, reason, conscience, tradition."
The Ingersoll Foundation is the philanthropic division of the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company of Rockford, IL.
Geoffrey William Hill
Geoffrey Hill was born in 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcester, England and educated at Oxford University. With the publication in 1961 of For the Unfallen, his first collection of poems, Hill's reputation as one of the most accomplished poets of his generation was firmly established. His next collection, King Log, won both the Hawthornden Prize in 1969 and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1970. A host of other awards and prizes followed for his subsequent books of poetry: Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992 (1994), Canaan (1997), and The Triumph of Love (1998). His new book-length poem, Speech! Speech! will be published this year. Hill has also published works of literary, cultural, and linguistic criticism, including The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (1984), and The Enemy's Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (1991).
Hill has taught at the Universities of Leeds and Cambridge in England, and is currently Professor of Literature and Religion and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He is also Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The body of work that Hill has produced over the last four decades has been hailed by writers as diverse and prestigious as Donald Hall, Harold Bloom, Seamus Heaney, Peter Levi, Anthony Burgess, and John Hollander. Of Hill's achievement, Paul Mariani, poet, biographer, and member of the Eliot Prize committee, has written: "Geoffrey Hill has rightly been called the finest British poet of our time. His poetry, like his criticism, is austere, careful, complex, and at once translucent and opaque. A survey of his work reveals a man passionately, doggedly, in touch with the Western tradition, a wordsmith constantly attempting to overcome the inertia of language, to somehow recover, in Hopkins' phrase, 'the radical innocence of God's first kingdom.' ... He is passionately and meticulously concerned with the ethical and theological dimensions of language, and has schooled himself in the European, British, and American traditions in ways that suggest affinities to Eliot and Pound at their finest."
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