I began this book with a discussion of Geoffrey Hill’s fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, in which he railed against the misconstruction of democratic writing as merely ‘accessible’, and conceded that he felt ‘marooned’ in the 1950s with the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hill returned to these themes throughout his tenure: in his eleventh lecture (11 March 2014), he warned that ‘it is public knowledge that the newest generation of poets is encouraged to think of poems as Facebook or Twitter texts […] the poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse’.What might it mean, I asked at the beginning of the book, if contemporary poetry had a ‘rule’ instead to exasperate rather than to assuage?.