Robert Holland— On 16 August 1822, it took Lord George Byron, his friend Edward Trelawny, a gaggle of Tuscan soldiers and a local health official an hour to find the spot on the beach near Viareggio where Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpse had been left two weeks before in the burning
“A pinch-mouthed, grave-digger’s poetry,” which remains “rich and allusive,” with “passages of stunning beauty.” This is how poet and critic William Logan describes Geoffrey Hill’s recent collection, A Treatise of Civil Power, in a front-page review for the New York Times Book Review. Logan goes on to say, “English has