"The grading and measuring of words"

One is initially inclined to read this as irritating condescension on Geoffrey Hill's part:

Hill spoke deliberately slowly so I can’t miss or mistake a word. He is also very considerate: when naming critics or texts he offers to spell them, then checks that I have caught up with him before beginning a new train of thought. At times, however, he sounds as though dictating to a machine: ‘As I said at my lecture it is only Ruskinian Tories who would sound at all like old fashioned Marxists, period. I read and re-read Ruskin- comma- particularly- and now I’m going to spell something for you: “F-o-r-s”, new word, “C-l-a-v-i-g-e-r-a” ’. He often asks me to repeat his answers back to him, insisting that I change a word or watching as I scribble out one phrase and replace it with another. Half way through our meeting he asks if I intend to write up the interview as a question and answer or to paraphrase him: when I admit I am undecided he responds that he will not consent to its publication if it is paraphrased. He agrees that the interview can be accompanied by an introduction and in exchange I promise to quote him directly.

(from an Oxford Student interview). Read on, however, and the situation becomes clearer:

You have famously defended the right of art to be ‘difficult’: would you therefore defend the right of poetry to be elitist?
We have to define what we mean by elitist: considerable confusion will arise unless we can get clear in our heads what ‘elitist’ means. If ‘elitist’ means belonging to some threatened hierarchy of the intelligence then I think that the poet has an obligation to attune her poetry in that direction. There is a largely unknown order of human beings who believe in that impossible thing: intrinsic value. One must work as if intrinsic value were a reality, even though I myself know no way of demonstrating its real existence.

What if we say that ‘elite’ means university educated?
Well I can’t assume that it does. Wordsworth was a hierarchist of the imagination and the unlettered man or woman can be as much a part of his world as Wordsworth himself. 

How is one to paraphrase this? What does it even mean? My best guess is that Hill means something like this: just as Wordsworth, a hierarchist of the imagination, classified the world into things that were imaginatively valuable, like his peasants, and things that were not (like Johnson's prose); so "the poet" ought to be a hierarchist of the intelligence, to order things by their intrinsic intellectual value, and to "attune" her work toward things that possess such value. (To ignore fashion and "relevance," to know how to "leave out" and keep valuable distinctions from collapsing,...) He cannot mean too sharp a distinction between intelligence and imagination or the second answer would be a non sequitur. He might also be using hierarchy to mean rank-in-a-hierarchy, which gives you the more conventional position that the poet should write for an audience of peers, but makes the Wordsworth remark less intelligible. In any case this is the sort of answer you would have to spell out; one feels the bafflement that led the interviewer to paraphrase the first answer as an evasive yes, though I am sure that it isn't that: elitism in the conventional sense is not a charge Hill would "evade." (Though he is surprisingly -- and hilariously -- cagey through the rest of the interview...)

Hill's critical habits are perhaps a useful guide to what one should expect here; one is not aware of any critics who operate more completely at the level of the (usually overexamined) word, for instance in this essay on Dryden in The Enemy's Country. This remark from the essay is perhaps relevant:

Quotidian language, both casual and curial, is itself highly charged, but charged with the enormous power of the contingent and circumstantial, "a confused mass of thoughts", a multitudinous meaning amid which the creative judgment must labor to choose and reject. There are meanings which are self-evidently wrong ("reserate" is not the Latin for "shut the door") but the "meaning" of a poem, its constitution, the composition of its elements, is not so readily extractable from the constituted solecisms of the age; and though the grading and measuring of words presupposes the ability to recognize ambiguities, there are some ambiguities so deeply impacted with habit, custom, procedure that the "recognition" is in effect the acknowledgment of irreducible bafflement.

(Btw I love "grading" in this context.)

PS See also the Google correlate for Hill.