Christopher Ricks takes his title from Blake’s aphorism “Opposition is true friendship.” To the subject of the imaginative engagements (and disengagements) of Hill, Hecht, and Lowell with Eliot and Pound—and Dante as a further key influence—he brings his superhuman ability, no less amazing for being familiar, to detect verbal echoes, parallels, and reworkings. While the thrill of the chase is undeniable, the danger is that the book sometimes reads like a collection of annotations to editions of these poets which do not yet exist, resulting in a rudderless feel to the writing. To prove a debt is one thing, to estimate the success of the indebted poem another; Ricks sometimes neglects the second task, taking for granted that the poem is beautiful or moving.

This is most acute, and most problematic, in the chapter on Hill, which does nothing to help those who have no idea what his later poems are about, and who suspect that unintelligibility is masquerading as difficulty. Hill’s status as a major poet is simply assumed. His criticism is not treated so respectfully. Ricks contrasts his grudging, often carping, references to Eliot in his essays (on which, see my review of Hill’s Collected Critical Writings in The New Criterionof December 2008) with the greater generosity of the poetry, and, like me, puzzles over the meanings Hill gives to “pitch” and “tone” in his criticism. He objects to Hill’s exaltation of F. H. Bradley and Charles Williams at Eliot’s expense, and to his contemptuous