Sometimes difficult and often very funny, Sir Geoffrey Hill – who died this week, aged 84 – was one Britain’s greatest living poets. He granted a rare audience to Sameer Rahim for this interview, first published in December 2013

Geoffrey Hill is arguably our greatest post-war poet. Over the past 50 years he has produced searching, searing work on England's troubled history, the Holocaust, the meaning of Christianity and the decline of modern culture.

When I interviewed Seamus Heaney in 2009, he was full of praise for Hill: “He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech,” Heaney told me, “a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain”. The novelist Colm Tóibínis another admirer. “Every phrase he uses has a sense that it was examined and sifted not only in the light of mere experience,” he tells me via email, “but in the full light of knowledge, and with the full realisation of how dark, ambiguous and misleading knowledge can be.” He is a poet, adds Tóibín, who “seeks to lift language beyond itself”.

Despite eminent supporters, though, Hill has never received the popular acclaim or prizes lavished on Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Heaney. His work is dismissed for being old fashioned and obscure. He is rarely taught in schools. In one notorious attack, Tom Paulin accused him of being a closet fan of Enoch Powell. In The Triumph of Love (1998), Hill summed up what many in the poetry establishment think of him: “Rancorous, narcissistic old sod – what / makes him go on?”