Although Hill has now been nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry — a position for which he is ideally qualified, both as poet and critic — his reception in Britain since 2006, when he returned to settle in Cambridge, has been curiously mixed. He has always had his detractors here but it's sometimes hard to know what vexes them most. It may be his Christian faith, as self-lacerating as it is celebratory. In The Triumph of Love (1999), he asked, "So what is faith if it is not/inescapable endurance?" but in the same work composed a sublime canzone to the Virgin Mary. It may be his fierce and passionate engagement with English and European history and tradition, the saints as well as the monsters. It may be his intricate, polyphonic style — what he has come to call, echoing Dante, "a noble vernacular". Perhaps it is all of these, along with the fact that Hill, now in his 77th year, continues to stand apart.
After 12 collections of poetry spanning almost 60 years, and a succession of magisterial literary essays, now gathered in the more than 800 pages of his Collected Critical Writings (Oxford, 2008), he still remains, as he put it in Speech! Speech! (2000), "terror-stricken, unteachable".
If Hill is underrated (as opposed to being simply "underread"), that may be because he is routinely considered "difficult". This is no truer of Hill than of Pound or Eliot, Isaac Rosenberg or Dylan Thomas but their works have been smoothed by long familiarity and Hill's has not.
In his later work, beginning with Canaan in 1996, Hill's music has become increasingly more complex. He weaves together hymn-verses, "old saws", interjections, headlines, buzz-words, editorial asides, foreign phrases, slogans, American slang, creating a strange interrupted eloquence.
Over the past half-a-century, Hill has been patiently creating a style of his own, which has boldly confronted the horrors of the age, as well as rare instances of heroism and sanctity.
Its distinctive music may owe much to "the outnumbering dead" but in the end it's unlike any other poet's. If it sounds harsh, maybe that's because we haven't yet learned how to hear it. It is a music that promises to "survive these desolations".
