Didn’t suggest it was a competition. Offered my opinion. I regard him as a minor lyric poet as I said. What Ron Silliman termed The School Of Quietude, not groundbreaking or radical in form or content. Safe pair of hands… As if Modernism hadn’t happened. Yeats stepped out of bogs and celtic twilights to produce some radical work aided by the problematic genius of Pound and was someone who was hardly a nationalist in the usual accepted sense, with one foot in English culture and the other in Irish culture. 'Easter 1916' is a great poem because it deals with these issues in subtle ways. Geoffrey Hill was a radical poet formally and with regard to content. In his last published work there are hints of rap weirdly enough and praise for Corbyn, of all people. Hill regarded modern Britain as an ‘anarchiical plutocracy,’ a term he nicked from William Morris, I believe. Yeats had a wide range as did Hill, which included ‘arty farty references to the classics’ as it would be difficult to be a poet embedded in English without them. They connect back across history and give resonance. ‘No mysticism.” A bit of it might have lifted Heaney above the prosaic and parochial… But as ever, its a complex subject to deal with in a shortish post so each to their own, citizen...