I attended Oxford University in the mid to late 1990s, so I missed Seamus Heaney as Professor of Poetry (1989-1994, a pre-Nobel Heaney, who nonetheless replied to my humble letters and agreed to serve as advisory editor for my small magazine, Oxford Quarterly, only weeks before he received the “Swedish thing,” as Hemingway superstitiously called it).

I arrived at the university in time to enjoy James Fenton’s lectures (1994-1999), collected in The Strength of Poetry by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (highly recommended). I also sat in his greatly rewarding seminars on modern poetry. He was followed in the post by Paul Muldoon, who preceded Christopher Ricks and the current professor Geoffrey Hill.

Little is expected of the Oxford Professor of Poetry except to deliver serviceable lectures on the broad topic of “poetry.” We are lucky to have had such excellent ones from recent occupants of the post, but, fine as they have been, none holds a lantern to Hill’s (although recordings of the other four I’ve mentioned do not exist, so far as I am aware, the lectures are invariably collected in books, Fenton’s in Strength of Poetry, Heaney’s in The Redress of Poetry, Muldoon’s in The End of the Poem, and, though I do not know if his Oxford lectures found their way into print, Ricks edited the Oxford Book of English Verse).

The English department at Oxford University has generously posted Hill’s recent lectures online as free podcasts. The hour-long lectures are far more lively and amusing than one has any reason to expect, at times riotously funny. Hill proves equally humble and magisterial, amenable and quarrelsome (sparring at considerable length with the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on the subject of texting and “democratic” notions of verse), as ready with an endearing anecdote as a devastating rapier thrust. I typically listen to them several times over while working on other things, in order to fully absorb everything he puts across. His lectures repay repeated listening.

You may follow this link to the main page and click on the lectures to stream them online.

Sadly, the lectures of March 6th and May 8th 2012 have been lost to history due to “technical difficulties,” which seems a grave forfeiture to me (if I may be permitted a mock Hillian turn of phrase!). Though the lectures will surely appear as a book at some point, the listener is genuinely enlivened by hearing the man himself read. Have a listen!