"Were Whitman, Yeats, Hardy? Yes, of course they were. They were also tremendously sane. Their poetry kept them sane, fulfilled their sanity, spoke of and for their sanity. I do not claim equality with them, but neither do I affect a false modesty. I think I was discerned as being ‘wired weird' by my Bromsgrove schoolmates, and was to some extent ostracised for that reason. Rightly so, I think. At the same time I would claim a sanity, at once basic and overarching, for myself in terms of my craft. I may not be, but my poetry is, profoundly sane, and I believe that it will be more and more recognised to be so as time goes on. Of course," he added, "I'll be gone by then."

We stopped for another cup of coffee. The rain if anything was heavier. The sheep trooped back in the opposite direction, still in single file.

If the test of the "sanity" is the ability to engage with what matters most to us, individually and collectively and, in so doing, to remain, over 60 years, scrupulously alert to the weight of both the world and the word, then Geoffrey's poetry is indeed profoundly sane. Does this mean that, as time goes by, his poems will secure a wider readership?

No, sadly, it does not. We live in an age that expects its poetry to be immediately accessible. Geoffrey does not share this populist belief. "Accessible," he once said to me, is a perfectly good word if applied to supermarket aisles, art galleries, polling stations and public lavatories, but it has no place in discussion of poetry and poetics.

His critics allege that his poems are impenetrably difficult. The truth is that every first reading is likely to yield lines of heartbreaking beauty ("the may-tree filling/with visionary silent laughter"; or "The marvellous webs are rimed with eternity") and wry humour ("I wish I understood myself/more clearly or less well"). Most readers will find his range of reference (from, for example, Dame Helen Mirren to Thomas Bradwardine) challenging, but a good search engine helps pretty quickly to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

In an interview given to the Paris Review in 2000, Hill's response to the charge that his poetry is excessively intellectual was that life is difficult. "Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other and we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when, if such simplifications were applied to our own inner selves, we would find it demeaning?"

Art, he believes, has "a right to be difficult" if it so wishes. "Cogent difficulty, that yields up its meaning slowly, that submits its integrity to the perplexed persistence of readers of goodwill, is one of the best safeguards that democracy can have." Why? Because "tyranny requires simplification...Propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequence, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualification and revelation...resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.