There is much in this description that accords with the ethos and perspectives of Geoffrey Hill's poetry. Hill, however, is not the subject. Rather, these words were used by Randall Jarrell, in 1947, to summarize the concerns of Lord Weary's Castle, the first full-length collection by Robert Lowell. In characteristically vigorous and inventive terms, Jarrell outlined the struggles dramatized in the early poetry of Lowell, struggles that would in due course come to exercise Hill: the passage anticipates both Hill's sense that poetic language is mired in, yet strives to escape, the deadening forces of ‘custom’, and his belief that the poet needs to defy ‘the stasis or inertia of the stubborn self’ – to repudiate, as he put it to John Haffenden, ‘a certain kind of luxuriating in personality’ – and to work towards ‘transcendence’ of self-regard in the process of composition. Yet, though the pressures of ‘custom’ and selfhood are to be resisted, they cannot be eluded: they define, in Jarrell's phrase, ‘the realm of necessity’ in which the poet is constrained to practise his or her art.

For Hill, this sense of constraint extends to an acute awareness of the ‘necessity’ of working in the verbal medium, with all its debasements, approximations and equivocations. There is a theological charge to this: his ‘sense of language itself as a manifestation of empirical guilt’ (LL 7), as a constant reminder of humankind's fallen condition, encourages a view of the poet's art as an unavoidable confrontation with spiritual anguish.