[Geoffrey Hill] always was, of course, a Christian poet, and much of his poetry is about wrestling with his faith (or more specifically, wrestling with aspects of himself, with depression and despair specifically conceived in terms of sin), a set of beliefs and attitudes I did not share. He was also, I suppose, what we might call a politically ‘conservative’ writer (although actually I think Hill’s politics were quite complicated and more idiosyncratic than the tag ‘conservative’ implies), although I was not, and am not. But then, Coleridge was also very much both a Christian writer and, in his later life, a political conservative, and there seems to me actual merit, quite apart from my personal enjoyment, in reading him against the grain. from a position, like mine, that does not share many of those assumptions. I don’t mean in order to critique those attitudes, but on the contrary to try to read them in good faith. But writers like Coleridge, and I think Hill, need to be rescued from readers who identify too strongly with the positions they are dramatising.