Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Peter Porter are all dead, as are the vast majority of the Movement, the Group and the contributors to The New Poetry. And long before they died, the spirit of The New Poetry, and the spirit of extremism, in so far as they had ever advocated it, had been turned against by all who survived the 1960s. Still, one poet of the New Poetry generation has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before, and that is Geoffrey Hill. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Indeed, it can seem as if 1962 happened forty years later for Hill than for everyone else. The dramatics of the long sequences, The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech! in particular, are those of the bad-mannered poet beyond gentility giving a show to a ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ and telling them uncomfortable contemporary and historical truths. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring. Hill may be aware that the small injustices visited on him by the reviewers of his books are of little significance compared to the gravest historical crimes, but they do cause comparable consternation in a poetry which thrives as much on its bad taste and lack of proportion as on a sense of moral rectitude.

Of a piece with this are Hill's cantankerous dealings with T.S. Eliot. In The Shaping Spirit, A. Alvarez, who is much more appreciative of the later Eliot than Hill was to be, comments on a passage of The Dry Salvages, italicising ‘Or even a very good dinner’ as one of those ‘flashes of rather heavy condescension that bring home how much depends on maintaining the decorum and formality of his poetic occasions’.