A conception of poetry as public utterance, shaped with a regard for the public good, has repeatedly found expression in the writings of Geoffrey Hill. In his essay ‘The Eloquence of Sober Truth’, Hill has even hinted at a connection between the prerogatives of the individual citizen and the exercise of an individual poetic voice: ‘the question of polity’, he observes, ‘is, at its most basic level as also in the most elevated language of response, that of entitlement to speak, one's right to claim authority, albeit as a private person contending in – and with – a public matter’ (SF 116). Given the frequency of Hill's observations on language itself as the ‘public matter’ ‘in’ and ‘with’ which the poet necessarily contends, it is tempting to infer from his words a suggestive connection between poetry and polity. Yet Hill is under no illusions about the limitations of the poet's public voice. He knows that insofar as any authority may be achieved in one's art it can only, at best, be of the kind described when, in the essay ‘Keeping to the Middle Way’, he considers the prose works of Robert Burton and Thomas Nashe:

In the case of Hill's own work, the ‘praxis of an individual style’ involves recourse to a peculiarly ‘eccentric’ form of ‘authority’. This is especially true of his recent volumes, with their capricious swerves between savage indignation and comic deflation, the eulogistic and the elegiac. A kind of contrived eccentricity also defines Hill's adoption of various voices and masks – as when, in The Triumph of Love (1998), he presents versions of himself as seen through the eyes of fantasized detractors: an ‘obstinate’ (TL V) or ‘shameless old man’ (XXXVII), an ‘obnoxious chthonic old fart’ (XXXIV), a ‘rancorous, narcissistic old sod’ (XXXIX). The role of a maladjusted, malcontented literary misfit is one that Hill both cultivates and parodies.