His point was characteristically paradoxical – that attempts to be popular or widely understood often end up being undemocratic, and that leaders who bandied about banal demagoguery tend to be despots. The very difficulty of his poetry gave it a moral charge, to which the reader had to rise. As he put it, “Nothing true / is easy”, before checking himself again: “is that true?”

Just as puzzling is how a poet who was so dismissive of a large readership should have reacted in so prickly a way to the reactions of readers. His work can be seen as an extended dialogue with an uncomprehending but bemused audience, who will have read in The Orchards of Syon (2002): “I desire you / to fathom what I mean. What do I mean?”

And even as he is scowling at the trappings of popular culture, he shows familiarity with it. His more “street” language is strangely up to date – “IN YOUR FACE!” and echoes of Paul Celan or Calderón de la Barca sit alongside nods to Elton John or Monica Lewinsky: “(Rum place for a cigar, Herr Präsident…)”.

This shows culture and memory to be high among his priorities. Hill’s knowledge of music, poetry, art and philosophy was always embedded in a wry assessment of the world around it. His ultimate concern was how to honour the memories of things or people worth honouring.

These would include the victims of pogroms, whether they were Nazi atrocities or the horrors of Clifford’s Tower in York in 1190; or the victims of war in Africa, such as Colonel Fajuyi, who died for showing hospitality to a guest when Igbos wanted to kill him in 1966; or the poet Christopher Okigbo, who was a casualty in the Biafran war. He would also honour those before him who had paid similar tributes in previous generations. For all his apparent hostility to the world, he called himself a “praise singer”, and earned a place among the praise singers of the past.

He admired the Elizabethan Catholic martyrs, such as Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion, who were, he explained, “transcendently fine human beings whom one would have loved to have known. The knowledge that they could so sublimate or transcend their ordinary mortal feelings as to willingly undertake the course they took, knowing what the almost inevitable end would be, moves me to reverence for them as human beings and to a kind of absolute astonishment. The very fact that they lived ennobles the human race, which is so often ignoble.”

None of this public damning or feting prevented him from writing intensely personal poetry. The longer, later poems often document a private battle with depression, and are revealing about the medication, such as lithium, that it took to produce them. However open he was about this, he still saw it as “ammunition to those who don’t like me … they say 'Hill has just turned the tap on and now he can’t turn the tap off.’ ”

After these struggles throughout the three biggest texts – The Triumph of Love; Speech! Speech!; and The Orchards of Syon – that last work stands as a kind of Paradise following on from the preceding Hell and Purgatory, and it tenderly evokes the landscape he knew as a boy.

Geoffrey William Hill was born at Bromsgrove on June 18 1932, to William, a police constable, and Hilda Hill, and grew up in the nearby village of Fairfield. Geoffrey ruled out following his father into the constabulary, or joining the Armed Forces, because from the age of 11 he was deaf in one ear. Fortunately the condition did little harm to a lifelong love and intimate knowledge of music. He quickly decided on an academic career, and in 1950 left Bromsgrove County High School for Keble, Oxford, where he took a First in English.

His mother was a reader; his father not so much. Geoffrey had won Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as a prize at Sunday school and “fell in love”, hoping, he remembered 70 years later, “to do something that might equal or exceed the mysterious beauty of these things”. His first poems appeared while he was still at Oxford, in Donald Hall’s Fantasy Poets series.

His debut piece, “Genesis”, portended much that would follow: the pastoral imagery, the wrestle with faith, and ultimately the violence. “There is no bloodless myth will hold,” he wrote, in contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice.

He went on to teach at Leeds University, where he would appear in a gown to deliver lectures that students remember as being “Byronic”. His status was enhanced by his growing reputation as a poet. In 1959, For the Unfallen appeared. It is a mystical work, composed with scrupulous regard for formal verse and conventional genres.

From then until 1964, he wrote more sporadically. He had married Nancy Whittaker in 1956, and had four children with her. The marriage was dissolved in 1983.