critics to make
poetry once again a vehicle of the very highest truth. He
insists, too, that great thought cannot be contained within the
untroubled cadences of the heroic couplet. His own preference led
to the freer, though currently unfashionable, Pindaric, the
irregularity of which seemed justified by Biblical example, for
despite a century and a half of study and speculation the secret
of Biblical verse had not been solved and to most critics even
the Psalms appeared devoid of any pattern. Indeed, Cowley had
declared that in their freedom of structure and abruptness of
transition the odes of Pindar were like nothing so much as the
poetry of Israel.

In addition, Hill would have the modern poet profit by another
quality of Biblical style: its magic combination of a
"magnificent Plainness" with the "Spirit of Imagery." This is the
Hebrew virtue of concrete suggestiveness, so highly prized by
20th-century critics and so alien to the generalized abstractions
and the explicit clarity of much 18th-century poetry.

In consonance with those who believed poetry best communicated
truth because it appealed to man's senses and emotions as well as
to his logical faculty, Hill praises those "pictur'd Meanings of
Poetry" which "enflame a Reader's Will, and bind down his
Attention." Yet his analysis of Trapp's metaphorical expansions
of Biblical imagery reveals that Hill does not like detailed
descriptions or long-drawn-out comparisons. Instead, he admires
the Hebrew ability to spring the imagination with a few vividly
concrete details. Prior to Hill one can find, in a few
paraphrasers and critics like Denham and Lamy, signs of an
appreciation of the concrete suggestiveness of the Bible, but
most of the hundreds of paraphrasers had felt it desirable to
expand Biblical images to beautify and clarify them. Hill was
apparently the first to prove the esthetic loss in such a
practice by an analysis of particular paraphrastic expansions.

Despite his theory, however, Hill's own paraphrase seems almost
as artificial and un-Biblical as those he condemns. He often
forgets the principles he preaches. But even in his preface there
is evident a blind spot that is a mark of his age. His false
ideas of decorum, admiration for Milton, and approval of Dennis's
interpretation of the sublime as the "vast" and the "terrible,"
all lead him to condemn the "low" or the familiar. And his own
efforts to "raise" both his language and his comparisons