Transfiguring language …

… Geoffrey Hill and the poetry of ideas | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For Hill, a poem must be "at once spontaneous and exacting". To use an analogy he had used in March: poetry must, like the chaconnes and passacaglias beloved of the Baroque, be "simultaneously wild and strict. This is a quality which somehow must be brought back into English poetry this century, or English poetry will die."