Heaney backs Hill for Poet Laureate job

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney (pictured) has backed fellow septuagenarian and rank outsider Geoffrey Hill to be the next Poet Laureate to take over from Andrew Motion, whose 10-year appointment runs out next month.

Seventy-six-year-old Hill, whose work has been variously described as inaccessible, difficult and violent, would make "a magnificent Poet Laureate", said Heaney, who turned 70 on Monday. "He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech… a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain."

However Heaney - who turned down the post in 1999 and who has been faint-hearted in his praise for Motion - admits that Hill is unlikely to accept. "His poems show an acute distress at the falling away of standards - cultural and political. I think because of that he wouldn't want the job."

Bookmakers would no doubt agree: they have tipped Carol Ann Duffy, 53, and Simon Armitage, 44, as the frontrunners. Three leading female contenders - Wendy Cope, 63, Fleur Adock, 75, and Ruth Padel, 62 - have already ruled themselves out of contention having claimed the post of 'poet to the Queen' was "archaic".

Hill's very English - not to say nationalistic - aesthetic has been much mocked. The Irish critic Tom Paulin attacked Hill's use of the Virgilian trope of 'rivers of blood' – as deployed infamously by Enoch Powell - while Wendy Cope included a parody of Hill's Mercian Hymn in her 1986 anthology Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.