‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ deals with a challenging topic, and presents several challenges to the reader. The poem was first published as the opening poem in Geoffrey Hill’s second collection, King Log (1968). Before proceeding to our analysis of the poem, you might want to read ‘Ovid in the […]
An important poem about bearing witness to atrocity Geoffrey Hill, who died in 2016, once defended ‘difficulty’ in poetry, arguing that ‘genuinely difficult art is truly democratic’. Human beings are complicated, so any poetry that is to be worthy of us should reflect our complexity, whether moral, emotional, or intellectual. […]