By TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS [DAILY TELEGRAPH] — One of Hill’s formative early memories was the sight German bombers flying over his home town of Bromsgrove. “Here were these peculiar, businesslike – sinisterly businesslike – winged things… I can still remember the peculiar frisson of it,” he told The Telegraph in 2013. “Strange as it sounds that incident – which can’t have lasted more than a minute and a half – has dictated for the rest of my life the way I have perceived certain juxtapositions of the real and the surreal. One is simultaneously terrified, appalled and curiously detached. Which is as good a description of a poem as I can think of.”
He was a particularly revered figure among poets. “He would make a magnificent poet laureate,” said Seamus Heaney in 2009. “He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.”
“However,” the Nobel Prize-winner added, “his poems show an acute distress at the falling away of standards – cultural and political. I think because of that he wouldn’t want the job.”
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Continued at the Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.
They write from relentless confusion,hoping to put to paper what eludes them, resorting to word
entanglements as distraction from their restlessness, perhaps awaiting reviews to learn what they had said.