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'. Milton's phrase became a mantra for Hill in his later decades, to the extent that he prefaced a remark in 2000 with the qualification that: 'I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous and passionate'. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'sensuous' was 'apparently invented by Milton, to avoid certain associations of the existing word sensual': 'sensuous' and 'sensual' comprise a dichotomy that recurs throughout Hill's later collections. By tracing these words' occurrences across Hill's poetry, this article explores the significance of Milton's neologism to Hill's abiding preoccupation with the Fall and its linguistic consequences. In particular, it argues that Hill views Milton's coinage as a paradigm through which to interpret the depiction of prelapsarian Eden in Paradise Lost (1674).
