‘Simple, Sensuous and Passionate’: John Milton and Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

In an interview in 1976, Geoffrey Hill articulated his 'ideal in writing poetry' with a quotation from John Milton's Of Education (1644): 'simple, sensuous and passionate'. 1 At the beginning of 'Poetry as "Menace" and "Atonement"' ( 1978) -Hill's inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds and the opening chapter of The Lords of Limit -he again acknowledges 'simple, sensuous and passionate' as a dictum 'to which I am sympathetically inclined'. 2 Having quoted Milton's phrase in further interviews in 1980 and 1981, when Hill spoke to the Paris Review at the turn of the millennium he felt obliged to preface a similar remark with the caveat that 'I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous and passionate'. 3 While 'simple, sensuous and passionate' encapsulates Hill's 'ideal in writing poetry', for Milton the phrase explains why poetry concludes his ideal syllabus in Of Education. AsStephen M. Fallon writes: 'Milton gives it pride of place at the end, crowning a curriculum devoted to grammar, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, politics, theology and church history, history, tragedy, drama, and rhetoric'. 4 Having outlined a programme that builds towards the 'organic arts', Milton places at its culmination the study of poetry, which is distinguished from logic and rhetoric (which directly precede it) on the grounds that they are disciplines:, To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being lesse suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate. (CPW II. 401-3) 'Subsequent' for its being placed last in the scheme of learning but 'precedent' in the importance accorded such a position, poetry in Milton's programme is valued for its 'simple,