For Hill, a poem must be "at once spontaneous and exacting". To use an analogy he had used in March: poetry must, like the chaconnes and passacaglias beloved of the Baroque, be "simultaneously wild and strict. This is a quality which somehow must be brought back into English poetry this century, or English poetry will die." (The composer David Matthews was inspired by Hill's "Funeral Music" to write his gigantic orchestral Chaconne, evoking the Battle of Towton in the Wars of the Roses.)

It was evident that Hill identified strongly with Hopkins, while confessing himself perplexed by his methods and humbled by his sacrifices. But the poet in Hill, weary of the charge that his work is too obscure, rejoiced in the "good-humoured irascibility" of Hopkins's response to his friend Robert Bridges, who asked what he meant by his poem "Henry Purcell": "My sonnet means Purcell's music is none of your damned subjective rot, so to speak."

To hear Geoffrey Hill speak — and the Oxford lectures are all available as podcasts — is an exhilarating experience. His delivery is almost, but not quite, theatrical — especially when compared to the dry, monotonous manner of most modern academics. But Hill is not, despite having spent the greater part of his life teaching at Leeds, Cambridge and Boston, primarily an academic. His declamatory style of oratory, rising to incantation in the recitation of verse, is indebted, rather, to the great poets of the past: to Yeats and Eliot.

Poetry as transfiguration of language: Hill has pursued this project with iron consistency for more than 60 years, ever since his first slim volume (a pamphlet of five poems, now extremely rare) appeared in 1950 while he was still a 20-year-old undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford. But for Hill the poetical has always been the political. In his Oxford lecture he thinks foul scorn that politicians should presume to be above criticism in their use and abuse of language. Indeed, the prophetic mode comes naturally to him in verse and prose.

Hill has on occasion come under attack for his allegedly reactionary tendencies, notably from Tom Paulin — the Northern Irish poet and Oxford don notorious for an interview in which he appeared to encourage Palestinians to kill Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Paulin took exception to Hill's Mercian Hymns, which had the temerity to allude to Virgil's prophetic vision of civil war, since 1968 associated to English ears with Enoch Powell's "Rivers of blood" speech and hence for Paulin — but not Hill — now fatally compromised in perpetuity. Hill has never explicitly defended his choice of this line, but the Mercian hymn in question has nothing to do with immigration. It actually describes a "visitation of some sorrow" to the dungeon of Boethius, the Roman author of The Consolation of Philosophy who was tortured to death, concluding thus: "He set in motion the furtherance of / his journey. To watch the Tiber foaming out / much blood." This is not the dog whistle of demagogy, but a valiant attempt to reclaim Virgil's line for the realm of literature.

Nor may Hill be accused of sycophancy towards politicians with patronage: there is nothing unctuous about his verse, no eulogies of or dedications to living leaders, though he is generous with his praise of the dead and the dying. Some of his collections have political titles, including the one chosen for his entire oeuvre, Broken Hierarchies. Hill's mental landscape was shaped by the two world wars, and the "backlog of monsters" they bequeathed. But he is devoted to the preservation of what he calls "intrinsic value", values embodied in poetry, which are not relative or arbitrary.