Hence his attachment to the idea of hierarchy: not in a political but a moral sense. In an essay making the case for Hopkins as a true democrat, he writes with reference to the Catholic Church: "It will be objected that a hierarchical institution cannot be democratic, but what it cannot be, in the world's terms, is egalitarian, even though it teaches equality before God." Hill is democratic but not egalitarian. "Bless hierarchy, dismiss hegemony," he declares in the last poem of his Liber Illustrium Virorum, his "Book of Illustrious Men". The moral hierarchies broken by war and tyranny live on in poetry.

It is evident, then, that Hill takes poetry, his vocation and his obligations to the muse, with the utmost seriousness. Not so apparent, until one has heard him out, is the fact that he does not take himself too seriously. My evidence for this is circumstantial but cumulative: sly little digs at the carapace of authority that inevitably surrounds a man long since wearied by hearing himself feted as "our greatest living poet"; a lively awareness of the contradictions and limitations of his critical theories; no hint of vanity about his own poetic achievement; and a readiness to engage with anybody who had turned up to hear him, even if their only purpose in doing so was to get him to sign copies of his books.

He is, though, evidently hurt by the lack of attention paid to his collected poems, Broken Hierarchies, which appeared at the end of last year. When I mentioned that I would be writing this article about him, he looked mildly reproachful: "A footnote about my book would be nice." I am conscious of my inadequacy for this task — but how does one do justice to a collection that is not so much a book as a cosmos? A glance at the voluminous literature on Geoffrey Hill, however, should suffice to put such authorial anxieties to rest. Besides the bibliography, a remarkable range of composers have set Hill's poems to music, while his fame extends to America and France.

Asked if he liked a particularly severe photograph of himself, he replied: "It terrifies me." While he believes strongly in the poet's need to understand and justify his own methods, he accepts that poetics must never tyrannise over poetry. His doctrine that "the grammar of the poem decides the grammar of belief" must be suspended to grasp what is going on in "The Windhover": the "chevalier" to whom Hopkins speaks is Christ, but only Hill's theological intuition, not the internal evidence of the poem, tells him so. Hill cheerfully admits to his own eclecticism: "I am a walking example of the marvels of serendipity."

 Yet the two great volumes of his poetry and prose — Broken Hierarchies: Poems, 1952-2012 and Collected Critical Writings, both edited by Kenneth Haynes and published by OUP — represent a corpus of achievement, at once literary and intellectual, that is unparalleled in our time. One has to go back half a century, to T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, to find adequate comparisons. Eliot (born 1888) and Auden (born 1907) were each the dominant poetic voices of their respective generations; each produced major works of criticism as an integral part of his life's work. But the generation of poets that succeeded Eliot and Auden had not one but several voices, of which the outstanding ones were Philip Larkin (born 1922), Ted Hughes (born 1930) and Geoffrey Hill (born 1932). Although Larkin was a fine jazz critic, he had no desire to write a substantial body of literary criticism. Hughes did write a work of criticism, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, but although it mattered greatly to him — as literary editor of The Times I published his riposte to his critics — few would deny that it is great only in its self-indulgence. Thus Hill is the only poet of his generation to lay claim to the mantle of Eliot and Auden — to the vocation of the poet as, in Shelley's words, "the unacknowledged legislator of the world".