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A straightforward reading of Style and Faith would lead to the conclusion that Hill cares a good deal more about style than about faith. On matters of style, or more generally of language, he is always quick to state a conviction: that the revised OED does ill to include "tofu" while neglecting Hopkins' coinage "unchancelling"; that David Daniell was unwise to modernize the spelling of his edition of Tyndale's New Testament; that Isabel Rivers' critical study Reason, Grace and Sentiment "is oblivious to its own compliance with the prevailing jargon of modern communication." But when considering matters of faith Hill assumes the dispassionate voice of a historian: he will demonstrate that the various styles of Burton, Hooker, and Donne incarnate equally various modes of faith, but he will refrain from stating a preference. He will explore with great sensitivity and nuance a single pivotal word in a poem by Vaughan, noting its spiritual resonances but judging them not.

Such a habit leads the reader—or leads me, anyway—to wonder if some of Hill's critical statements are not cloaked self-revelations: "Clarendon's style, therefore, however firmly it adheres to the principle of integrity and comeliness, in practice is bound to show signs of strain, of badly resolved perplexity, partly realized contradiction, and implicit self-contradiction." (Does this suggest Hill's dissatisfaction with his own long-honed style, and a resulting need for change?) Or this comment about the tension between theology and artifice in the Wesleys' hymns: "I think it entirely possible for a hymn to be, at one and the same time, joyful and 'unhappy'; that kind of oxymoron is inherent in the creative matter, the ganglion of language and circumstance from which the piece of divine poetry is created." (An explanation of the deep sobriety and sadness of much of Hill's verse?)

These are the merest of speculations, and could scarcely be anything else. But one passage is clearly more than that, and truly illuminates Hill's thinking. Near the end of his essay on Vaughan, he stresses the need to conceive of language as "something other than a mere ancillary of 'vision' or 'experience.' Language is a vital factor of experience, and, as 'sensory material,' may be religiously apprehended."

That affirmation links Hill not only to Vaughan but also to the poets who bookend this volume, Hopkins and Eliot. As different as they may have been stylistically, both sought to achieve a fully "religious" apprehension of language and were continually (even agonizingly) aware of the forces in self and world that set themselves recalcitrantly against poetry's hopes for catching the transcendent. In these essays—as in his previous essays—Hill situates himself in their company. We should preserve Hopkins' inscrutable "unchancelling," however few people will care about it, and even if our concern for such words leads us to neglect "tofu." After all, did not Eliot remind poets that their task is to "purify the dialect of the tribe"? That style matters is, for Hill, an article of faith—as it was, he says, for John Donne: "With Donne, style is faith."

Whether Hill's joining of style and faith has anything to do with actual Christian belief—as it certainly has for Donne and Hopkins and Eliot—I cannot say. Adam Hirsch, writing in The New Republic about Hill's most recent book of poems, The Orchards of Syon (2002), points to a passage in which Hill writes, "But the Psalms—they remain," and suggests that they offer "if not wisdom, then something / that approaches it nearly. And if not faith, / then something through which it is / made possible to give credence." Hirsch notes the "evasion" of this passage, its refusal to make a straightforward avowal of wisdom or faith. And the same evasion is present in this volume: Hill concludes his preface by noting that "in most instances style and faith remain obdurately apart. In some cases, despite the presence of well-intentioned labour, style betrays a fundamental idleness which it is impossible to reconcile with the workings of good faith." Reading which I think, "good faith"? Bona fides? Oh, I thought you were talking about faith."

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