Abstract With a formal analysis of the 2007 double sonnet ‘Holbein’ at its heart, this article considers Geoffrey Hill’s wide-ranging engagement with early modern literature and politics, including the Henrician poets Wyatt and Surrey. Through close attention to Hill’s striking use of the sonnet-form, the essay demonstrates how Hill reactivates early modern questions about the fraught position of the poet within a corrupted polity. By placing ‘Holbein’ alongside Hill’s broader citational practices and his readings of other early modern writers, including Milton, the essay argues that Hill uses early modern models not as allegories for the present but as sites through which to question the limits of poetic resistance and the precariousness of the ‘quiet mind’. A coda to the essay turns to Wyatt’s reappearance in Hill’s posthumous volume, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). Here, the earlier poem’s concerns return in more personal form, again reconsidering the uneasy relationships between poetry, the public responsibility of the poet, and the security of private life.
Huw Griffiths (Wed,) studied this question.