Within [Geoffrey] Hill's poetry is a passion much like the innermost passion of Eliot's poetry: a terror of death, of death as emptiness, as meaninglessness, as existence separated from the ultimate Good, from that central sun of certain value. Thus, like Eliot, Hill feels the need to expose unexamined experience from the past to the sun of ultimate value by way of poetry. That is, he would unearth "the trodden bone," "the common man of death," by means of his own "knack of tongues"; he would gild the dung, praise the bone. At the same time, he is uneasy about turning history into poetry. It is not at all certain that the Lazarus unearthed is really the same Lazarus as he who lay with the speechless dead. Unavoidably, poetry provides its own loam for whatever resurrected experience it contains; the unexamined experience it would expose may remain as...