Hill's poems are complex in syntax and lexicon, dense with allusion to literature of the past, to English history, to European history and religious thought. American poetry, over the twenty years of Hill's publication, has largely moved into simplicity of diction and grammar, and into discourse which has rid itself of allusion: a poetry largely without history, founded often on notions of historical discontinuity, sometimes on defiant ignorance. These purities have made a powerful American poetry, though it is possible that their utility has exhausted itself; but I do not contrast Hill with American practice in order to beat the one with the other. I call attention to the contrast because it is great enough to make Hill appear all but unreadable—pretentious, affected, impenetrable, reactionary—to Americans unfamiliar with, say, English religious poets of the seventeenth century.

Actually, American readers looking for a door into Hill need...