Afflicted by paralyzing depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior, Mr. Hill wrote with agonizing difficulty until he was treated with drugs after moving to the United States in the 1990s. In rapid succession, a spate of poems ensued.

Paradoxically, the easier it was for Mr. Hill to write, the more difficult the poetry became. “The Triumph of Love” (1998), an anguished survey of the 20th century’s endless bloodshed, and “Speech! Speech!” (2000), a poem consisting of 120 12-line stanzas, created imposing obstacles to comprehension.

Some critics rebelled. “Hill has made it brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him,” the poet William Logan complained in a review of “A Treatise of Civil Power” (2008) in The New York Times Book Review. But he added: “And yet. And yet. Hill is the most glorious poet of the English countryside since the first romantic started gushing about flowers, his verse so radioactive in its sensitivities that his landscapes have been accused of cheap nostalgia.”

Geoffrey William Hill was born on June 18, 1932, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where his father, like his father before him, was a village constable. After graduating from the local high school, he earned a degree in English literature at Keble College, Oxford, where his poems appeared in student publications.

Already apparent were the preoccupations with theology and violence. The narrator of the Blakean poem “Genesis,” either God or poet, proclaimed: “By blood we live, the hot, the cold,/To ravage and redeem the world:/There is no bloodless myth will hold.”

The American poet Donald Hall, also at Oxford, was deeply impressed by Mr. Hill’s work and published him in the Fantasy Poets series. These poems were included in his first collection, “For the Unfallen: Poems, 1952-1958,” published in 1959.

It took Mr. Hill nearly a decade to produce enough work for his second volume, “King Log” (1968), which included one of his best-known poems, “Ovid in the Third Reich,” on art in the presence of evil.