The Columbia History of British Poetry (61 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 261
Although the text of
Lycidas
resolves poetic doubt by enacting poetic mastery, that resolution, again, does not become an occasion for a public authorial claim; the poem appeared in an obscure miscellany, obscurely signed by the poet only with his initials. The poem's occasion and its textual self-assertion are at odds. As in the case of
Comus
, Milton was to claim the poem in the fullest sense only when he published it in his 1645
Poems
. The Latin inscription on the book's title page suggests that Milton considered the volume as a whole to be his pastoral beginning, implying a promise of more ambitious poetry yet to come. Indeed, in minor Latin poems written soon after
Lycidas
, Milton proclaims himself the model English poet who will write a new epic based on British history, an epic in which King Arthur will figure significantly. Ironically, Milton was not to publish another major poem until
Paradise Lost
in 1667, over twenty years later. In fact, by 1645 Milton had already decided to leave poetry for political writing.
Prose
In 1642 the civil war between the monarchy and Parliament broke out. Both a religious and political revolution, it began as a struggle between the established Anglican Church and radical Protestants (commonly known as the Puritans), who demanded a reformed Church closer to continental Protestantism and less like Catholicism. Milton interrupted his poetic career to write political prose supporting the radical Protestants (especially the Presbyterians) in the name of religious liberty against the enforced conformity of the Anglican Church, which was meting out harsh punishment against outspoken nonconformists. Milton reveals his need to maintain the integrity of his own personal narrative by treating this detour as if it in fact really was part of his plan all along: he is now working for the Church, "to whose service by the intentions of my parents . . . I was destined as a child, and
in my own resolutions
" (emphasis added).
At the same time, autobiographical passages in his first works in the cause of the Church,
The Reason of Church Government against Prelaty
and
Apology for Smectymnuus
(both written in 1642), reflect on his poetic calling; having suspended, if only temporarily, his drive toward a poetic career, Milton now unequivocally considers poetry his natural element, and attributes to himself a poetic authority that could easily be thought overblown, considering he had by this time written only three
 
Page 262
substantial poems, two of them fairly short. But Milton is still obsessed with preparedness. He now worries whether he is prepared to write effective political prosethe labor of his left hand he calls itas he once worried about his readiness and ability to write poetry.
During this period Milton further adds to his poetic persona a record of scholarly preparation already defended in his letter justifying his poetic belatedness; he constructs for himself a narrative of personal intellectual development, a narrative that reenacts a literary history beginning with the Latin elegists, and continuing on to Dante and Petrarch, the chivalric epic, and finally to Socrates and Plato, the philosophers who epitomize chastity as the enabling virtue of epic. In fact, in the 1645
Poems
, Milton adds a retraction to his Latin elegies, declaring that the study of Socrates has taught him to encase his breast with ice for protection against erotic impulse so that he can gain epic strength.
Milton deepens this connection between his personal and literary narrative when he considers his current political activity as the final preparation for a heroic poem. As he puts it in the
Apology
, "he who would . . . write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem," presumably, in his case, by involvement in a just cause. In the
Reason of Church Government
Milton specifically pledges, after more study and experience of the world, a major worka national, military, religious poem, either a long or short epic, but possibly a tragic drama, whichever is most "doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." This poem will do for the English what ancient classical and biblical poets (as well as modern Italian poets) did for their countries. Based on ancient models, the poem will project the "pattern of a Christian hero,'' drawn on a king or knight from British history.
During his prose period Milton composed the vast majority of his works, the works for which he was primarily known among his contemporariesprose pamphlets promoting personal, religious, and civic liberty, including liberal divorce laws and limited freedom of the press. His defense of the execution of Charles I brought him to the attention of Cromwell, the parliamentary general and Puritan head of state, who ultimately appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues, a position in which he was responsible for state correspondence and the defense of Puritan policies to a European audience. In the process he went blind.
In 1654 Milton undertook to celebrate the leaders of the English revolution in his
Second Defense of the English People
, in which he arrives
 
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at the threshold of achieving the voice that will speak
Paradise Lost
. Milton celebrates the parliamentary heroes of the Civil War, but he also distinctly reveals his faltering faith that the new order will be able to sustain itself. He concludes by insisting that he has done his part by providing counsel, especially in his written works; he compares the
Second Defense
itself to an epic, almost as if he had with this prose work fulfilled his long-standing promise to write an epic. If that is so, Milton has revised his self-narrative by declaring his prose not an interruption, but the very fulfillment of his epic claim, both in his writing and in his person.
Most significant, Milton here takes one of several occasions (including sonnet XIX: "When I consider how my light is spent") to defend himself against charges that his blindness was a divine punishment for supporting regicide. He declares his blindness a divine gifta substitution of spiritual for physical sightwhich renders him "almost too holy to attack." He has uncannily become the blind seer, the very image of the epic poetlike Homerthat he idealized in his youthful elegies.
It is impossible to tell whether Milton would have felt his epic ambition fulfilled in the
Second Defense
had the revolution not failed and had the Stuart monarchy not been restored in 1660 with the return of Charles II, the son of the beheaded king whose execution Milton defended in his prose tract
Eikonoklastes
(1649). But it is clear that after the failure of the political institution that provided a framework for his sense of himself as a person and a poet, Milton's notion of both epic and poetic authority likewise dramatically changed.
Paradise Lost
When Milton returned to poetry to fulfill his "covenant with any knowing reader," a covenant made in
The Reason of Church Government
to write a great epic, he did in fact write in all three genres he considered in that prose work: a long epic (
Paradise Lost
), a short epic (
Paradise Regained
), and a tragic drama (
Samson Agonistes
). Milton further develops themes that appeared in earlier works, such as temptation and the inverse relationship between the epic and sexuality. (In two of the three last works failed action results from a dysfunctional relation with a woman.) However, none of his heroic poems is quite the work he projected in 1642. Perhaps the most obvious indication of his changed notion of epic is his choice of subject for
Paradise Lost
: a cautionary tale
 
Page 264
about committing the wrong action. Milton probably began writing
Paradise Lost
in the mid-to late 1650s, roughly about the same time that he completed the
Second Defense
, whose incipient disillusion it reflects and intensifies. That is, Milton's great epic appeared, and much of it was written, after the collapse of the political and religious ideals to which he had devoted much of his life. A questioning attitude toward action pervades Milton's three last and major poems. Although Milton considered writing a tragic drama about the Fall as early as the 1640s, his choice of that biblical event as the subject of
Paradise Lost
must be seen in light of the failed revolution. The work stands in startling contrast to most epics, which typically celebrate a great action.
Although encyclopedic in scope, broad in its learning, and bold in its poetryencompassing the battle in heaven between God and Satan, the story of Creation, and angelic dialogues on the major intellectual and scientific issues of the day, and concluding with a vision of universal history
Paradise Lost
is after all about being wrong. Its central action, the Fall, is about transgressing the boundaries of proper actiona transgression at times uncomfortably close to Milton's own participation in rebellion.
Paradise Lost
, like
Paradise Regained
and
Samson Agonistes
, is riddled with questions about the very nature of a right action, in stark contrast to his confident assertion at the beginning of the revolution that true wisdom is knowledge of "what is infallibly good and happy in the state of man's life" (
The Reason of Church Government
).
The problem of action in
Paradise Lost
is translated into its problematic generic form. Milton's prefatory note on his use of unrhymed verse makes it clear that he conceives of
Paradise Lost
in the mold of Homer and Virgil. But the reader is immediately struck by all the inversions of classical epic conventions. The heroic ethos of epic is strangely embodied in the villain of the work, Satan. Instead of the council of the gods, we are presented with a council of devils. More broadly, the plot pivots around a peripeteia, or fall, more characteristic of tragedy than epic, and a tragic rather than epic heroAdamdominates the work. Moreover,
Paradise Lost
is an epic whose central action occurs in a garden, a place usually depicted in epic as a counterfoil to epic action.
This genre slippage betrays a deep-seated fear of loss of control. To narrate the work Milton must cross a formidable epistemological dividehe must discern secrets of prelapsarian existence while in the state of postlapsarian exile from Eden. Milton distances himself from the potential presumption of this move by claiming divine inspiration,
 
Page 265
projecting the same prophetic voice he assumed when he defended his blindness in the
Second Defense
. In four extended invocations to his muse (at the beginning of Books I, III; VII, and IX) he either asks for or explains the inspiration that allows him to go forward with the epic enterprise. In Book III he claims inspiration from the same source that inspired Moses and that supervised Creation itself. His blindness, he insists, is the very mark of his spiritual insight, his divine authority. In Book IX he climactically proclaims that, "unimplored," he is nightly visited by his celestial muse, who inspires his "unpremeditated Verse."
But Milton rarely makes this claim without raising the possibility of error, like the Puritan theologians who cautioned that belief in possession by the Holy Spirit may really be a Satanic delusion. In fact, Milton's call for divine aid at the very opening of
Paradise Lost
is uncannily echoed by Satan's demonic aspirations. Milton's opening prayer to be raised by divine inspiration above all other epic poetsraised high enough to "justify the ways of God to men"is directly followed by a description of Satan's rebellion, a description suffused with metaphors of rising, "aspiring / To set himself in Glory above his Peers" (just as Eve is "heightened'' when she eats the forbidden fruit). The troubling parallel between Satan and the poet is deepened by Satan's association with perversions of poetic faculties, such as his "proud imaginations," his conjuring use of fancy and illusion to begin his seduction of Eve. Milton leaves open the possibility that, like Satan, he too may be "self-raised."
In the invocation to Book III he addresses the divine light he cannot see, and asks, "May I express thee unblamed?" In the invocation to Book VII, having just related the battle in heaven between God and Satan, he ponders whether "I have presumed" to narrate matters heavenly, and asks that his muse bring him down safely lest he fall on earth "erroneous . . . and forlorn." At the end of the invocation to Book IX he raises the possibility that he has waited too long to write
Paradise Lost
; he wonders whether the poem may actually be not inspired, that it may in fact "all be mine, / Not Hers, who brings it nightly to my Ear." Three-quarters into the work, he thus raises the possibility of its fundamentally mistaken claim; almost a century after his model Spenser had established the authority of an English epic voice, Milton is still insecure in his own epic role.
Milton's counterpointed assertion and questioning of his authority to undertake "things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme" (I.16) reflects

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