Hill is as far as most of his contemporaries from appreciating
such a literal translation as the King James Version. On the
other hand, he is one of a small group of critics who were
beginning to see that at least certain aspects of Biblical style
were of universal appeal; that they might be as effective
psychologically for the modern Englishman as for the ancient Jew.
And he sees in this collection of ancient Oriental literature a
corrective for some of the worst tendencies of a degenerate
contemporary poetry.

Hill's attack upon the current preoccupation with form and
polish, and his contempt for mere smoothness, for the padded
redundancy of Addison and the elaborate rhetoric of Trapp, are
all part of a campaign waged by a small group of critics to make
poetry once again a vehicle of the very highest truth. He
insists, too, that great thought cannot be contained within the
untroubled cadences of the heroic couplet. His own preference led
to the freer, though currently unfashionable, Pindaric, the
irregularity of which seemed justified by Biblical example, for
despite a century and a half of study and speculation the secret
of Biblical verse had not been solved and to most critics even
the Psalms appeared devoid of any pattern. Indeed, Cowley had
declared that in their freedom of structure and abruptness of
transition the odes of Pindar were like nothing so much as the
poetry of Israel.

In addition, Hill would have the modern poet profit by another
quality of Biblical style: its magic combination of a
"magnificent Plainness" with the "Spirit of Imagery." This is the