TS Eliot and Grouch Marx were fans of each others works and eventually met for a dinner. It was a disaster and they never spoke to each other again. The very English poet John Cooper-Clark successfully combining the visual,seriously poetic Baudelairean and hilarious. Mark E Smith of the band The Fall recognising intuitively what Schopenhauer claimed about music and words. Iggy Pop has explicitly stated his "Dionysian and Apollonian" interests . Seamus Heaney and Bono are the pits. As bad as Oasis,Blur, Tony Blair and their fans. 100 tons of cocaine up bankers noses later and it`s austerity politics and gruel-propaganda for everyone. Many poets supported the Pussy Riot artists via English Pen poetry and music events last year.

Oddly, Daniel Johnson suggests at one point that Hill's "declamatory style" is in the tradition of Yeats and Eliot but then refers only to Eliot at other points. I assume Johnson jettisons Yeats from the discussion because Hill seems to be of the Eliot school when tradition and individual talents are the subject. I'd rather be with Yeats, who published a whole lifetime of selfies that grew from a sense of self as a part of the universal. Eliot may have tried in the Four Quartets, great poems that they are, but Eliot seems always to decide what ideas are of value and then fit his poems to those specific ideas. To me, this isn't a poetry of ideas but a poetry of "my ideas have value and yours don't." At his most limited, Eliot speaks as a rootless American who suffers from the worst of my compatriot's weaknesses, the insistence on holding tight to a cramped belief in a tradition that doesn't exist by itself but that is merely one part of a much larger, more inchoate tradition, in this case the tradition of poetic expression--although political, religious, and social traditions would work just as well for Eliot. Yeats too could be dogmatic but never to the extent that Eliot was. Even in crabbed old age, Yeats was still searching for resolution of opposing ideas. Even as a youth, Eliot had largely rejected any such attempt at resolution. Philosophy, religion, politics may require such rejection, but poetry, more often than not, abhors it. No wonder Eliot had to reject the ghost of Yeats in "Little Gidding." No wonder Eliot quit the craft of poetry (poetic drama aside) after his quartets. I don't mean to imply that the selfie impulse can't lead to poorly constructed poems. A lot of contemporary poetry would put the lie to such a claim. I also agree that poetry has lost much of its luster. This loss, however, results from competition for a limited audience from other more popular forms of expression, not from any failure on the part of poets of the age. I can equally appreciate the examples Johnson gives from both Walcott and Hill, finding Hills no more or less universal than Walcott's. I consider Walcott's "Omeros" the greatest long form poem of the last five or six decades, but I don't like his sexism any more than I like Eliot's antisemitism. Nor does it mean I devalue Hill as a poet expressing himself. A more capacious poetic tradition exists than either Johnson or Hill seen willing to accept. I have no problem accepting Eliot and Hill as part of this capacious tradition. I've never understood why they both seem incapable of accepting poets dissimilar to themselves as a part of the tradition. Then again, I define the poetic tradition as the most artful examples of a multitude of poets speaking in poetic language, not as poets enforcing my preconceived idea about ideas.

This is an interesting essay but it loses focus when it begins to imitate the coat-trailing that characterizes too many of Hill's supporters. It doesn't do Hill any favours to ramp up his reputation at the expense of his contemporaries. What does it mean to say that "Walcotts and Heaneys [...] delight the ear but are content to go with the flow"? Can you really differentiate Heaney and Walcott from Hill on these grounds? Remember Walcott's often bitter and admittedly autobiographical (but less selfie-like than Wordsworthian) long poems about his estrangement from both Anglo-American AND West Indies cultures. And Heaney wasn't usually thought of as 'going with the flow': remember 'My passport's green' or his rebuking of John Carey, or his critical stance in both the Republic and Northern Ireland on many political issues, from the IRA to the abortion referendums of the 1980s, which I would guess antagonized many more people than Hill's lectures. Another comparison, not made here, would say that, just as much as Hill, Heaney's essays and defences of poetry (including perceptive essays on Hill and Hopkins) as collected in 'Finders Keepers' continue the tradition of Eliot and Auden's critical prose.

Is it a gauntlet Hill throws down? Matthew Collings said his own paintings (made with Emma Biggs)in his recent London exhibition throw down the glove to what`s going on today. But do they? Or is it `today` that`s throwing down the challenges ? Are Hill(and Johnson)simply being ideological ? It was the philosopher Schopenhauer who claimed that it was music that brought us closer to the experience of the "ding an sich". And so it was/is with the music and poetry of Joy Division. The singer Ian Curtis even voted Tory before his suicide. "Existence,well what does it matter? I exist on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand." At the same time the poet John Cooper Clark recorded his classic `Beasley Street` with a band (produced by Martin Hannet). It`s a shame the elder poets,philosophers , artists and feminists (with the exception of Julie Burchill and Zizek) don`t credit any of the younger generation with some brilliance and elan vital or Holy Spirit. The English language is very generous. The opposite of our present politicians and clergy.