My friendship with Geoffrey is framed by Isaac Rosenberg. While a student at Oxford, I had asked my friend Edward Larrissy (himself later to become a Professor of English at Leeds) which contemporary poets he would recommend. Geoffrey Hill was among them. I bought King Log at Blackwells and, at the same time, Isaac Rosenberg’s Collected Poems, the Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding Chatto edition. I read ‘Funeral Music’ on the spot then opened the Rosenberg at ‘August 1914’. Both voices – the astonishing sureness of their tread – made an immediate, physical, impression. In my mind a connection between the two poets was forged that felt more a matter of affinity than contiguity. Some years later, when I was being interviewed for a lectureship at Leeds, it was my mention of Rosenberg that caused the dark head of Professor Hill, bowed in what I had construed to be despair at the calibre of this candidate, to lift up and his gaze quicken into interest. Isaac Rosenberg got me the job.

I was ignorant then of the long association between the University of Leeds and Isaac Rosenberg: the Brotherton Library having held a retrospecive exhibition of Rosenberg's work, curated by Jon Silkin, in 1959.¹ The Leeds School of English, through Jon Silkin and Stand then and since, as well as through Geoffrey Hill, has consistently upheld and actively championed the importance of Rosenberg. I was equally ignorant of the fact that Rosenberg was a poet whom Geoffrey Hill most particularly revered and that one of Hill's earliest poems, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, had ...