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"Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him" This is quite significantly false. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of the earlier Clutag "Treatise of Civil Power" - now that I'm not trying to build an academic career by driving my horse and my cart over the bones of Hill's oeuvre, I'm not quite the completist I once was. I do have the Penguin volume, however,which I think is very good and which says a few things about honouring the intelligence of "the common reader" (whom Hill in a recent radio interview referred to as "a natural aristocrat of the spirit", cribbing I think from Lawrence) that I wonder at Logan's simply ignoring in this fashion. There are two things Hill's current critics habitually do that I find particularly tiresome. One is moral exhibitionism, exhorting the reader to imitate the critic's efforts at decoding, say, _Speech! Speech!_ as if so doing might somehow make you a better person (like, e.g., your humble critic). The other is making a big fuss about the obscurity of his references, the normal method being to pick a couple of especially obscure ones and explicate them just to make the point about how terribly erudite and perspicacious one needs to be to handle this stuff (so unless you're as clever as me, dear reader, you might as well not bother). I simply don't think that's true; I think Hill's verse does most of its real work at some distance from its points of departure, and tracing the path back to the latter is an optional exercise: it depends on whether the poem itself makes you curious about its field of reference, and sucks you in. Reading Hill's poems has at times prompted me to investigate all sorts of recondite areas, and that has been one of the pleasures of them, but they are emphatically not calling for some sort of ideal reader who has read everything Hill has read and thought everything he has thought about it. Dominic