JOHN MILTON, ANNE BRADSTREET, MARGARET CAVENDISH
“Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience, and to invent a language of his own remote from the spoken word.” Thus W. H. Auden, forgetting Chaucer who “invents” the language Milton was to use, the self-involved excesses of Hoccleve, the wild candor of Skelton stepping across the threshold into modern English, the witty and plainspoken candors of Gascoigne, the erotic and spiritual adventures of Donne. No: Milton is not the first or even the second eccentric poet. It is in the nature of the poetic vocation—if we contrast it with a vocation for verse—to be eccentric, to work at a slight or a sheer tangent to prevailing conventions, to invent a language that speaks or sings in ways that “the spoken word” does not aspire to. The spoken word, in Auden’s sense, is generally instrumental, conveying instructions, information, feelings. The words that poems speak may do those things, but they have another dynamic, which is to honor one another, to exist together as a whole entity that, while it has an occasion, becomes an occasion, autonomous at once of the events that give rise to it and of the poet who utters it.
Yet Auden’s view of Milton is not eccentric. Milton was revered through two and a half centuries. Before Eliot tried to knock the bust off its plinth, only Doctor Johnson had expressed damaging misgivings, and he tempered criticism with grudging respect. Milton became a spiritual and literary duty, a task and test, a measuring stick, and a rod to every poet’s back. Shakespeare was monumentalized, but he remained engaging, inspiring, inimitable; Milton furrowed the brow of most readers. Walter Savage Landor looked up and saw:
Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
Over the highest Alps of mind he marches,
And far below him spring the baseless arches
Of Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.
The “fen” recalls Cambridge, where Milton, a beautiful youth with long locks, studied. “His harmonicall and ingeniose Soul,” writes Aubrey, “did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. He was a spare man... He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray.” For Landor, Milton’s poetry and prose constitute a huge stone arch, compared with the ephemeral rainbows of other poets. For Wordsworth, in one of his great sonnets, it is Milton the radical who demands attention. There’s that fen again:
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.
Yet Wordsworth was one of the few English poets of his time to struggle out from under the burden of Milton and write back into English. Milton leaves his mark less on the diction and more on the syntax and cadence of his verse and the wonderful way he handles line endings.
On one thing Robert Graves and T. S. Eliot, often at loggerheads, agree. They do not like Milton. Graves dislikes him as a man, and finds in his verse the very faults his life demonstrates. His book Wife to Mr Milton is savagely judicious. In an essay he cast aspersions on the moral integrity of this most high-minded of authors, on the Milton Wordsworth invokes. “By the time he had been made Secretary of State for the Foreign Tongues to the Council of State (a proto-Fascist institution) and incidentally Assistant Press Censor—why is this fact kept out of the text-books when so much stress is laid on the Areopagitica?—he had smudged his moral copybook so badly that he had even become a ‘crony’ of Marchmont Needham, the disreputable turncoat journalist.”
This says much about Milton, and about Graves. Eliot is less ad hominem, though as an Anglican and latter-day Royalist he can’t have felt comfortable with so vehement a man. “In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable... What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact that men of culture and intellect will be able to engage in rational discussion and agree to disagree, had been displaced by faction and sometimes violent intolerance. The moderate had stood down and the fanatic had taken his place, in the pulpit, in Parliament, and on the very peaks of Parnassus.” Eliot focuses on the impact of such changes on prosody. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, blank verse was a fully expressive medium; “After the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retrogression.”
The Lady of Christ’s College is a protean figure and no critic has been able to hold him satisfactorily for long. If you grapple with his marvelously complex language, you lose sight of its place within his elaborate and allusive forms; if you try to characterize his politics, you find the texture of the verse often running against the structure, as though his imagination was correcting what his partisan mind wanted to say. Can we believe even the simple sentiment of these Panglossian lines that close Samson Agonistes?
All is best, though we oft doubt
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Can he believe them, or only within the context of his artifact?
John Milton was born on 9 December 1608, “half an hour after 6 in the morning,” Aubrey says, “in Bread Street, in London, at the Spread Eagle, which was his [father’s] house (he had also in that street another howse, the Rose; and other houses in other places).” Milton père was a well-to-do scrivener and money lender who had attended Oxford, rebelled against his own father’s Roman Catholicism, and been disinherited when an English Bible was found in his chamber. He was, Aubrey says, “an ingeniose man; delighted in musique; composed many Songs now in print, especially that of Oriana.” He died in 1647 and was buried in Cripplegate Church.
He instilled in his son a taste for music and encouraged his ambition to be a writer. If Milton as a boy of nine or ten wanted to read late, his father made sure that a maid sat up with him until midnight and after. According to Aubrey, by the age of ten Milton was already a poet. “His school-master then was a Puritan, in Essex, who cutt his haire short.” By the time he went to St. Paul’s School, it had begun to grow back. There he studied under the excellent Alexander Gill. Gill used English verse in his lessons and Milton may have had his first exposure to Spenser there. He learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew and wrote what was regarded as exemplary Latin verses. In his last year at St. Paul’s, at fifteen, he wrote a poem with which any churchgoer is familiar from the hymnal, a paraphrase of Psalm 136:
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for he is kind
For his mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
Less successful but still dazzling is his paraphrase of Psalm 114, in couplets, including the beguiling lines:
The high, huge-bellied mountains skip like rams
Amongst their ewes, the little hills like lambs.
Metaphor here, and later in his work, has a different function from the one we recognize: the awkward juxtaposition of “huge-bellied” and “skipped,” the strange figuring of the mountains and hills, creates a tension of unlikeness remote from “all the clouds like sheep / On the mountains of sleep” that Edward Thomas gives us. Milton’s imagination incorporates the suggestive Hebrew usage into his largely classical culture. If we deplore mixed metaphor we will find much to cavil at in Milton.
When he went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625 he found the place disappointing, the curriculum dry and narrow. He craved a broader, more liberal education than was offered. He composed Latin poems in the manner of Ovid and Horace, epigrams, a Latin mock epic on the Gunpowder Plot, Italian sonnets, more English paraphrases of the Psalms, and the eleven stanzas “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough.” His Latin elegies are in some ways his most personal utterances, including details of his life and thought not recorded elsewhere. He was at this time as much at home in Latin as in English verse.
“On the Death,” for a nineteen-year-old poet, is a remarkable production, Elizabethan in manner, full of conceits that attest to his mastery of convention. It is notable for its finish, not its feeling. In the seventh stanza there is a hint of things to come:
Wert thou some star which from the ruined roof
Of shaked Olympus by mischance didst fall;
Which careful Jove in nature’s true behoof
Took up, and in fit place did reinstall?
Or did of late Earth’s sons besiege the wall
Of sheeny heav’n, and thou some goddess fled
Amongst us here below to hide thy nectared head?
Images of falling, rebellion, and the pagan gods are here with the delicacy (marred by archness) of the poet of Comus: accomplishment awaiting a subject.
After taking his BA in 1629, Milton stayed on at Cambridge. It was the period of his three religious poems, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the incomplete “The Passion” and “Upon the Circumcision.” The nativity ode is his first important English poem, celebrating the birth as an event without losing sight of its theological and cultural consequences. The central paradox is crucial to all his verse: human child and Son of God. The poet, like one of the Magi, arrives at the manger. Four introductory stanzas are followed by a hymn. He evokes the cold weather, not Mary or Joseph. Nature, humbled and bared before the swaddled infant, almost displaces the Virgin in the poem. Those who expect an imperious Messiah stand in awe before the helpless infant who becomes a focus for the whole natural world. The image of musical harmony acquires force. It is not, however, the Millennium:
But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so;
The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss,
So both himself and us to glorify;
Yet first, to those ychained in sleep,
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep.
These lines are so powerfully elliptical that the image is of the babe crucified. Into a hymn of joy flows the future, the somber truth that the dragon is not dead. The pagan gods depart, and we lament them: this babe is a swaddled Puritan. In the last stanza babe and Virgin are left together, one asleep, the other watching, protected by angels.
Milton took his MA in 1632. By then his career was well begun. Not only the great sonnet “On Shakespeare” (1630) but “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” had been completed (1631). The latter two, delicate and clear, use the tetrameter coupled with complete assurance and achieve, in prosody and syntax as well as diction, a distinction of tone between the voices of the happy and the melancholy man. The thoughtful man lingers in our company (176 lines) longer than the happy man (152). Both poems refer to the same conventionally visualized world, rather as Blake’s “Innocence” and “Experience” offer two perspectives upon the same material. Milton evokes distinct temperaments, or humors, “L’Allegro,” pastoral, “Il Penseroso,” elegiac. “Il Penseroso,” with his passion to know the secrets of the dark and his concern with death, is a little silly, with the gentle self-mockery we hear in Chaucer, an unusual note in Milton. Chaucer is directly referred to in lines 109–20 and echoed in lines 8–9. “Il Penseroso” is scholastic; meanwhile “L’Allegro” is less reflective, a Renaissance sort of fellow, patronizing “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,” who will “Warble his native woodnotes wild.” He mentions en passant Jonson’s “learned sock.” Milton was young enough to encompass both moods. History had yet to instruct him in the somber facts of political life, and his religious faith, though firm, was not yet hard.
After Cambridge, he retired for six years to his father’s Buckinghamshire estate—having written one of his ambitious and certainly his most respectful and flattering Latin poems to him, “Ad Patrem”—in order to complete his poetic training. “I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” He prepared himself more systematically than any other English writer has ever done: he wanted to know all that a man could know. He wrote three significant works at this time. Arcades, a diminutive masque for the Dowager Countess of Derby, was the fruit of his musical interests and brought him into contact with his father’s friend the composer Henry Lawes. Comus (1634), his great masque, was produced by Lawes. And there is his elegy “Lycidas.” Other work included a sonnet on the flight of youth (“How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth”), marking his twenty-fourth birthday, and three poems based on Italian madrigals.
Arcades shows Milton’s command of Elizabethan idiom and his skill in addressing an aristocratic audience. Lawes was confident to commission Comus, to celebrate the inauguration of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales. It was performed at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire. Milton, it is conjectured, played the part of Comus, seductive prototype for Satan.
Comus is not dramatic but ceremonial. The theme of chastity brings both elements into play. Here Milton again fuses Platonic and Christian thought. The Lady rejects Comus’s very specific advances and is freed into a universal love of the good. The allegory is simple: the Lady, lost in a wild wood, is tested, and in the end is found, and found virtuous. The Earl of Bridgewater’s three children were shown off to advantage and received instruction from the masque: on the first night they played the Lady and her two brothers.
A mélange of styles is tried in Comus, a transitional work, the fruit of retired studies in philosophy, theology and poetry. Little of the contemporary world finds its way in. Some of the writing is richly Elizabethan; some can’t but remind us of Dryden. Spenser and Shakespeare are nearby. Matthew Arnold speaks of Milton as being at the “close” of Elizabethan poetry. If this is so, Comus must be the last Elizabethan poem, already an anachronism when performed. It resists the excess of metaphysical wit, yet opens out, beyond that, to the drier regions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when language began to hover above its subject and to regard itself; when, as Arnold puts it, expression took precedence over action.
The character of Comus is a triumph. He not only tempts but embodies the temptation he promotes, a corrupt corrupter who exclaims of her vocal ravishments, when he hears the Lady sing:
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled.
The word “wings” belongs to silence, but prepares the way for “down”; silence and darkness are smooth-feathered birds. These overlaid images establish expectations of texture and movement, which Comus bears out in verbs of flight and in specific phrases: “the winged air darked with plumes”; “smooth-haired silk,” which “spinning worms” weave “in their green workshops.” It is almost the voice of his friend Marvell, only it is not a voice, shrinking away from the coarseness of common speech.
The tone of the poet of Paradise Lost is audible too:
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself his own dungeon.
These lines belong to the Elder Brother, a priggish character, who echoes (to refute) an earlier speech by Comus. Milton was unsuccessful with protagonists. Christ, God and Sampson repel us in different ways; what they represent they do not recommend. His antagonists can be admirable. They are given much of the best verse. Comus and Satan are attractive villains. Blake could claim Milton as “of the Devil’s party” and John Middleton Murry branded him a “bad man” on these grounds. Robert Burns declared, “I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments—the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, the noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage, SATAN.” Milton’s unequal skill in moral characterization is inevitable. Goodness and virtue cannot be particularized without limiting or containing them. Virtues are flimsy, tend toward abstraction when they aspire to be comprehensive. Evil, however, has to be particularized. Fallen men fall in different ways. Evil acts in a world of characters we recognize. The devil has the best, because the most diverse and seductive, tunes. A marriage between virtue and character, between pure qualities and mundane objects, is beyond most art, even his. Or is it beyond our comprehension? Is there a modern prejudice that finds the individual invariably more real, more attractive, than the universal?
“Lycidas” was composed for a collection of elegies dedicated to Edward King, a fellow undergraduate of Milton’s at Cambridge, who was drowned. King was not intimate with Milton, but the poet knew him as a Latin versifier and a candidate for holy orders. A pastoralelegiac mode, lamenting a fellow “shepherd-poet,” was appropriate. King’s intended vocation, pastoral in another sense, provided a pretext for introducing the religious strain; and the manner of his death, by water, supplied a wealth of classical references suitable to the idiom.
Although there are verbal echoes and borrowed motifs from Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, “Lycidas” is a very different kind of poem. Johnson condemned it for its diction, rhymes and prosody, but he disliked pastoral and found distasteful the introduction of criticism of the Church into such a context. He also comments that “where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” The grief in the poem is no more or less real than that of other pastoral elegies. The poem is not lament but elegy in a wider sense, like Milton’s Latin elegies. King’s death provoked in the no-longer-so-young Milton (he was twenty-nine) reflections on his own mortality, his limited achievement, and on the Church for which he himself had been destined. Bitter at the loss of so promising a life, he asks why the just and good should be squandered.
Each element in the poem belongs to a baptized tradition of pastoral elegy. The procession of mourners, the catalogue of flowers, the lament to nature, were off-the-peg. How he combines conventions, what he puts into them, is what matters. They’re part of a classically sanctioned framework. Something else, specifically Protestant and highly developed, is there too.
We should be surprised that Doctor Johnson was deaf to the kinds of feeling that inform and unite the poem, which moves from apprehension of death, through regret, to passionate questioning, rage, sorrow and acceptance. The poem begins in a minor key but progresses to a larger music, of divine justice and human accountability. The poem’s climax is a harsh attack on the clergy: “shepherds” corrupted by self-interest. Beside this indictment is set the catalogue of flowers, a superb tonal contrast. Lycidas has drowned: there is no hearse on which to place the flowers, so Milton evokes the body afloat in the sea. Beside this emblem of nature’s impersonal force he places the affirmation of resurrection. Order returns to the pastoral world (“Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new”). “Lycidas” more than Paradise Lost justifies God’s ways to man, and is the finest elegy in the language. Not all agree. Graves complains that “the sound of the poem is magnificent; only the sense is deficient.” The sense is deficient only to those who wish to limit the kind of sense poetry can make. Graves cannot forgive Milton for being the man he was; he cannot forgive the poem for not being lyrical. Most of the misreadings of “Lycidas” proceed from a lyric expectation. From a lyric we tend to expect a single, stable perspective on a specific area of experience; we expect integration and singleness of effect. “Lycidas” is a chain of effects: argument, lament, doubt, celebration. Single passages are “lyric,” but the poem as a whole is in another mode. It’s the most complex and the last poem of Milton’s youth.
In 1638 he traveled to Italy. He was away from England for fifteen months, recalled only upon the outbreak of the Civil War. On his return he memorialized in his best Latin elegy, the “Epitaphium Damonis,” his only intimate friend, Charles Diodati, whom he met in Geneva. Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador at Venice, had also delighted in his company. On his return he became a private tutor and began to plan an epic. It was to be Arthurian, celebrating the English nation. He describes it in the “Epitaphium.”
The Civil War drew him into political life. He began pamphleteering. If, as he says, he wrote prose with his “left hand” and poetry with his right, the left hand produced four fifths of the surviving opus. His whole endeavor was to see the Reformation through. For him the true reformers were, in England, “the divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif,” the Lollards, Marian martyrs and suppressed sectaries who followed him. Wycliffe was a necessary martyr, one to be revered both for what he did and wrote, and for what he represents in English and European radical and reformist history.
In 1642 Milton, the learned and formidably accomplished poet, married. He chose a sixteen-year-old Roman Catholic girl. It was a disaster. Aubrey is kind about the first Mrs. Milton, and Graves wrote a book giving her side of the miserable story. So troubled was Milton by the whole affair that he wrote his pamphlet on divorce, which was censored. Censorship provoked his best-known prose work, the Areopagitica (1644), an attack on official censorship, though he would have been inclined to censor poems he found obnoxious, and indeed he became a censor under Cromwell. When we consider the calculated adjustments—or hypocrisies—in Dryden’s spiritual and political career, we should remember Milton, who embodies the same kinds of compromise with circumstance, though he ended up on the Anglican, Dryden on the Roman, side of the fence.
The sonnets of 1642–58 are very different from the seven Italianizing sonnets of his youth. Written in the gaps between his substantial prose writings, they divide between the polite and the public. It is the trumpet call of the public sonnets that astonished Wordsworth: “Cromwell, our chief of men” (his only Shakespearean sonnet, where he asks the leader to “save free conscience from the paw” of Cromwell’s extremist followers, “hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw”) and, especially, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,” the great English poem of rage and revenge. Others might have been astonished by his vehement little translation from Seneca’s Hercules Furens, for The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:
There can be slain
No sacrifice to God more acceptable
Than an unjust and wicked king.
It was 1649, the year of Charles I’s execution.
In 1646 Milton’s first volume of Poems appeared. It included Latin, Greek, Italian and English work. In 1649 he waded deep into politics, defending the regicides in print. He was appointed secretary for foreign tongues to Cromwell’s council of state, a post he held for ten years. He had no say in policy but was required to compose official propaganda. This he did with skill and conviction. Blindness overtook him in 1652. He wrote his famous sonnet, “When I consider how my light is spent,” but he did not stint in his secretarial labors. During this period he suffered another loss. In 1656 (his first wife having left him long before) he married a second time, Katharine Woodcock. This marriage was happy, but Katharine died in 1658. For her he wrote his last sonnet, one of the most moving in English:
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she inclined,
I walked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
Robert Graves has nothing to say about this poem. It would have been hard for him to dismiss: it conforms to the rules of the lyric and, oddly, more even than “Lycidas,” to the expectations of elegy. Milton was to marry once again, in 1662. His third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, survived him. He married her “the year before the Sicknesse”—“a gent. person, a peaceful and agreable humour.”
We think of the poet, going blind, his cause (the Commonwealth) coming undone, as being of a melancholy disposition. Aubrey, a contrary witness, makes him out to have been a congenial chap. “He would be chearfull even in his Gowte-fitts, and sing.” He adds, “He pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard—a certaine signe of a Satyricall Witt—from John Dryden.” And reflecting how after the Restoration he was visited by foreign admirers, “He was much more admired abrode then at home.”
The Restoration put an end to his pamphleteering. It seemed, indeed, that he might be punished. But several of his friends, among them Andrew Marvell and Cavalier poets in whose corner he had fought behind the scenes, secured his safety, though he was briefly imprisoned. The Commonwealth extracted from him, beyond the sonnets, little verse. In his remaining years he made up for lost time, completing three major works upon which he had been engaged before: Paradise Lost (published 1667 in ten books, revised 1674 in twelve), Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671). His revised Poems appeared in 1673. Internationally known, he was invited abroad but stayed at home. In 1674 he died.
“My mind,” wrote Coleridge of the later Milton, “is not capable of forming a more august conception than arises from the contemplation of this greatest man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted: ‘Darkness before and danger’s voice behind,’ in an age in which he was as little understood by the party for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended, and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or, if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
...argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
Right onward.”
Does Coleridge overstate the case? Milton had the slave labor of his daughters, who read to him and scribed for him (the first women scribes thus recorded, who earned as meager a keep as the apprentice scribes in the old scriptoria), he had his plague of visitors who brought gifts, and it’s doubtful that he was so weak as to find “slander” and “persecution” more than the buzz of gnats. He was busy; he had become the Oliver Cromwell of his little world.
It was long assumed that the sequence of publication of the three last great works reflected the sequence of their composition. But a different chronology has been proposed. W. R. Parker suggests that Samson Agonistes was begun in the late 1640s and pursued in the 1650s. By 1655 Milton had probably written the dialogues of Paradise Regained—about three quarters of the poem. This places Paradise Lost at the end rather than the beginning of the last period. Poetically, this makes sense. Samson Agonistes is the thinnest-textured of the three, not because it is a drama but because Milton’s mature style was in formation. Images are switched on, as it were, and then switched off when they have done their illumination: they do not inter-qualify and build, they exist for their moment. Intellectual and moral aridity; the uncompromising and obnoxious coldness in the words of Samson’s father on hearing of the destruction of the theater, the foe (and his son), “Come, come; no time for lamentation now”; undigested debts to Shakespeare; the intensity of Samson’s lament on blindness, which implies that the poet had contracted the disability recently (later he accepts it calmly enough): these things suggest not a culmination of his work but a transition toward the largely dialogue form of Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes’ magnificent passages are well known: the description of Delilah, the lament on his blindness, arias in a Puritan opera. But the tragedy as a whole is intolerable. It is a political, not a moral poem.
Paradise Regained refers back to Paradise Lost in its opening lines, but this does not confirm a chronology of composition. In conception it is much more modest than Paradise Lost: the poetry lacks the style and lushness of epic. Spenser, after the model of Virgil, proceeded from pastoral eclogue to epic. Did Milton follow the same prescribed route? E. M. W. Tillyard noted the similarities between Paradise Regained and Virgil’s Georgics. If one prefers to argue for Paradise Regained as a dramatic poem, one must apologize for its shortcomings in every aspect, from characterization to dialogue and action: a conflict in the mind of Christ, it deals exclusively with his temptations in the wilderness. We observe not the mind’s processes, but stylized temptations. There is a continuous parallel between Old Testament history and Christ’s New Testament development. The poem is epic neither in style nor manner: it sings inaction, not action—refusals of temptation that are action only on a moral plane. Read as a Puritan georgic it makes formal sense, converting “the modes of classical poetry into the service of Christianity.” A georgic is a poem about the cultivation of the spirit, not the soil. Simple phrasing, lack of decoration, a general plainness, set it apart from Paradise Lost. The diction and style of the closing passages of each poem register their radical difference. In Paradise Regained, “characters” exist solely as clauses in Christ’s self-discovery.
Paradise Lost deals with the Fall, from which Christ redeems us. By the middle of the Commonwealth Milton’s social optimism and desire to celebrate England in Arthurian epic had faded. Christian epic was the highest form to which a poet could aspire. Its scope was cosmic, timeless, its moral purpose clear. Other forms of poetry were trivial by comparison. He began writing in 1658 and finished it around 1663. He defended his choice of blank verse on aesthetic and political grounds: his authority was Homer and Virgil. He advanced the usual arguments against “trivial” rhyme: “True musical delight,” he says, “consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another.” The key implement is supple and clear syntax, mimetic in some passages, analytic in others. Milton is expert at this drawing out, spreading his meanings, as Spenser does, sometimes over more than a dozen lines. Each sentence, every image, every word, has a number of functions to perform on literal and moral levels. Latinate syntax and diction allow flexibility and through echo or etymology create complex harmonies inaccessible in a simpler style. In using blank verse Milton claimed he was recovering an “ancient liberty” for English, long confined to the bondage of rhyme. Arnold praised Milton above all for this style, the poet’s “perfect sureness of hand”: nothing could be changed without violence to the prosodic or intellectual content.
Along with Latinate syntax and diction comes a panoply of classical and biblical allusion. The use of particular geographical names gives the poem enormous scope in space. The forward narration of the angels makes it possible for him to include all historical time, and in portraying the godhead he incorporates eternity. Paradise Lost positively bristles with learning. It is deliberate in plan, development and decoration. Despite the design, the poetry transcends its formal conception; characters are real, stand up and speak with some independence. They have distinct idioms: each fallen angel who joins in the great debate in hell speaks with a different inflection. Satan has as many voices as forms. The poet, who intrudes in the first person at several junctures, establishes a voice and orientation of his own: we can attribute the narrative. Autobiographical matter adds authority. There are, too, the perspectives. Scenes are presented through the eyes of particular characters, so that we see not only what but as they see. Satan’s vision of Paradise is more vivid than an “objective” vision could be. He sees with the eyes of resentment and revenge.
Milton integrates the levels of meaning. There is literal story, moral drama, political argument. Images of natural process substantiate the action or figure the movement of the poem, most poignantly in Book Nine, when nightfall and the human Fall are expressed side by side. “Earth felt the wound” of the Fall: the act changed not only the human condition but nature itself.
The twelve books move from the defeat of the rebel angels, their expulsion and fall, to the Fall of man and his expulsion from the Garden. There is “architecture” in the parallelism of scenes, and in the development of clusters of imagery connected with the several themes. But is there too much design? Has Milton done more than revive the medieval mode of allegory? Johnson was not alone in objecting to the “want of human interest” in the poem. Adam and Eve—apart from the archangel Michael’s prophecies—are the only people we meet, and they’re remote in innocence and in their earth-shattering guilt. We observe, standing apart. Coleridge distinguishes between the epic and the dramatic imagination. Both discover unity in variety, but the epic discovers unity by throwing its subject into the past, regarding it from a distance, while the dramatic brings it up close. A useful distinction, it illuminates both the failure of Samson Agonistes and the success of Paradise Lost. Our human access to Paradise Lost is, initially, through the realized character of Satan. Milton progressively diminishes him, through animal imagery and transformations, until he is a mere serpent. Thereafter we follow a sensuous argument, a symbolic enactment of our Fall. The longueurs of a poem whose action is so simple and whose telling so majestic and gradual come especially in the long conversations of Adam with Raphael and Michael. Expression exceeds occasion. We may agree occasionally with Yvor Winters’s criticism of the “pompous redundancy” of the verse, the rhetoric working as it were in spite of and away from the subject, “a dependence on literary stereotypes.” But whole books of the poem, notably the first, second, fourth and ninth, survive such criticism, and none of the books is wholly unastonishing.
For Paradise Lost Milton received an initial payment—generous in a way, given the length of the poem, Milton’s fall from grace, and the uncertainty of its success—of £5 and a further £5 when the first edition of 1,300 copies was sold through. The edition of 1674 broke Books Seven and Ten in two, bringing the epic to the appropriate twelve books. That was the year of Milton’s death. Six years later his widow sold out the rights for £8. That particular arrangement was shrewd on the printer’s part.
The case against Milton is largely a case against his effect on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was universal in Britain, and not confined to these islands. Milton is strictly inimitable: a radical and an anachronism. T. S. Eliot delivered telling blows, some of them against the moral content. The poem’s moral purpose, like that of The Faerie Queene, has become muted and remote. We read it for reasons other than edification. It fell to F. R. Leavis to square his shoulders before the master and try to knock him down. Leavis attacks first Paradise Lost and the grand style. He finds it predictable: “routine gesture,” “heavy fall,” “monotony.” He speaks of Milton’s “sensuous poverty”—the language is self-regarding, not turned to “perceptions, sensations, or things.” Elevation and remoteness impoverish rather than enrich our experience. Milton is “cut off from speech... that belongs to the emotional and sensory texture of actual living.” His style is “an impoverishment of sensibility.” Milton had “renounced the English language.” Having finished with Paradise Lost, Leavis turns to the other poems and makes short work of them.
Many of his charges are in part true. There is monotony; the grand style does compel an attitude in the reader (it has designs on us), the language is cut off from speech—except when it is speaking. But such facts need not be incriminating. The poem answers the more serious case. It is far from “sensuous poverty”: only a reader deaf to Milton’s complex forms of integration could level such a charge. It is richly imagined and in part richly realized, imaginable. There is subtle and delicate life in the verse, and a variety of subtleties and delicacies. In dismissing Milton, Leavis assaults the wide area of English poetry which he affected; and his effect is still felt. The prejudice of our age, as much an unwritten rule as the rules of decorum were in the eighteenth century, is contained in Leavis’s declaration that Milton’s language is “cut off from speech.” His sin is his language.
Yet for two and a half centuries—even for a “speaker” like Wordsworth—Milton’s virtue was this language, which engaged and developed subjects difficult to combine, moral verities and the created world. The language of speech is not the only, or first, language of poetry. To criticize work in terms strictly irrelevant to it is of little value: a critical act of “brute assertive will,” or a prejudice so ingrained as to be indistinguishable, for uncritical readers, from truth itself. With the decline of literacy, Milton, like Spenser, becomes a more difficult mountain to scale, more remote from the “common reader.” Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare, the only poets in the tradition who are Milton’s superiors, both grow and recede in the same way and are not dismissed. They seem more accessible. In the end Leavis’s hostility, like Empson’s and Richards’s in other areas, is to the Christian content of the poems, and in Milton it is obtrusive and central. We read Herbert’s and Donne’s divine poems even if we are unbelievers: there is their doubt to engage, and the framed drama of specific situations. But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language. Readers who resist have to make do with Satan and Comus.
Difficult, too, is the first poet of America, Anne Bradstreet, a woman who shared the rigors of Milton’s faith, and who stands at the threshold of a new tradition but is too reticent to force her foot in the door. Her verse for the most part looks back to her native England for form and diction and tells an English story even as it speaks from a new continent. She was born in Northamptonshire around 1612 into the highly placed Dudley family. She was a great reader in the well-stocked library of her Puritan father. At eighteen she married a Cambridge graduate nine years her elder, and under Governor Winthrop, crossing in the Arbella, they joined the Puritan emigrants in Salem, Massachusetts, becoming pioneers and moving out to Ipswich and North Andover. She bore eight children there (“I had eight birds hatcht in one nest, / Four cocks there were, and hens the rest...”) and wrote verse on myriad subjects, including long works on English history and on biblical subjects—“the fruit of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.” She is remembered for her more domestic pieces, as though—she being a woman—this were her proper sphere. Yet there is energy and spiritual force in her large-scale work. In 1652 The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America was published in England. She died in 1672 and her book appeared in revised form in Boston in 1678—the first volume of verse to be published there and “most vendible.” Her widower became governor of Salem during the witch-hunt trials.
There was little encouragement for her writing in the Puritan severity of the New World, where women had a specifically secondary role, a role her poems acknowledge even as they make their anxiously modest claims. Governor Winthrop wrote ruefully of “a godly young woman” who had given herself up to a kind of madness: to reading and writing “many books.” She kept her writing to herself and her circle, but her brother-in-law had it published without her knowledge in London.
She had absorbed Ralegh, Sidney and Francis Quarles, and she was passionately drawn to a translation of the French Calvinist Guillaume du Bartas’s compendious poem that Joshua Sylvester translated as The Divine Weeks and Works. Du Bartas is her problematic Muse. She was writing, but she was also writing against, no matter how readily she accepted her situation and circumstances. Her literary culture was arrested in 1630 when she set sail. One of her most celebrated poems is an encomium for Elizabeth I, long deceased. Milton’s Puritan wing never brushed her; in a culture of denial she was giving, humane, even ambitious, and out of the extreme exigencies of motherhood she wrote—as Adrienne Rich says—“the first good poems in America.” The best of these are poems to her husband, her father, and a poem on the burning of her house in 1666, which includes the brutally self-punishing Puritan lines:
Then, coming out, beheld a space
The flame consume my dwelling place.
And when I could no longer look,
I blessed His name that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just.
Milton would applaud the sentiment but find the crude end-stopping of lines and the awkward rhyming rebarbative.
John Berryman’s first major poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, gives her a more flexible voice. His imaginative advocacy turned attention back to her. The fact that she wrote with such candor and competence under the circumstances remains a miracle. Yet her poems cannot be made any better than they are.
Set her beside Margaret Cavendish, the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73) and they both come into clearer focus. “The crazy duchess” was childless, was not Puritan, was probably less deeply but more broadly read than Anne Bradstreet, but enjoyed the society of cultured men, including her poet husband. With him she endured exile in poverty during the Commonwealth, returning with the Restoration. Her wily couplets share the selfish energies of Rochester and Sedley; they have a social tone. Her attempt to bring Metaphysical style into the second half of the seventeenth century is brave and not altogether unsuccessful. In Bradstreet we admire the poet’s enormous pertinacity, but the value of the poems depends upon our knowledge of a self-denying life. The duchess’s verse contributes to the better verse of her age, and by being slightly antiquated it has—paradoxically—an air of originality in its conceits. She does not somehow seem serious, but when we read “A Woman drest by Age” and others of her conventionally spiritual poems, we realize how serious she is, though her verse does not run deep.