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Geoffrey Hill made the mistake, as a young poet, of stating in his biog that his dad & grandad were both village policemen. Critics have since made much of this. Al Alvarez recently wrote in The New York Review of Books that Hill had a 'Working Class upbringing' though most have pitched it as 'Lower Middle Class'. As if there is no difference. The connexion seems to be made between the upbringing & 'difficulty' of his poetry that Hill is somehow calling on his family history in trying to police the language. Back we come to the moralistic top of poetry as being about an essential emotion or truth that should be commun icated clearly & without obfuscation - that speed, density & abstraction are an abomination of the art and of our duty to relate as responsible human beings. That the randomness & chaos of life should not be reflected in poetry, but made clear sense of. That the poet should 'have' something the reader can 'ge...