In the 1802 version of his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth remonstrated against ‘the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry’. For Geoffrey Hill, who cites these lines in his essay ‘Redeeming the Time’ (LL95), the sentiment has lost none of its relevance. He is at one with Wordsworth in recognizing that an indifferently professed ‘taste for Poetry’ is pernicious for its very casualness. Equally to the point are the views conveyed by Coleridge in a letter to Thomas Poole of 28 January 1810 concerning regrettable tendencies in public reading habits, tendencies influenced by the output of a journal he nonetheless admired:

The first clause of this quotation provides another touchstone in ‘Redeeming the Time’ (90); it prompts Hill to aver that ‘the “general taste” of which Coleridge wrote is, as he knew, no innocent datum but something vicious, even if “innocent”; to an extent’, Hill maintains, ‘the innocence compounds the vice’ (95). To be unwitting of one's role in taste-formation is not only no defence but also potentially injurious. Hill vexes the word ‘innocent’ so as to make it susceptible to its opposite meaning: it turns ‘nocent’. This is the insidious menace of the prevailing ‘general taste’: by remaining ignorant of its own premises, it intensifies the power of ignorance within the culture.