Paradise Lost<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0140424393\")
<\/i> to his daughter.<\/p>\nWhat?<\/p>\n
Honestly. I go blank when I think of this. To have that, that, in your head<\/i> … the dedication and passion required to get it out<\/i>, whatever the means.<\/p>\n
There are some people who seem to be vessels of a higher being. Whatever you want to call it. You could tie them up, and throw them in a basement for 75 years, and they would STILL scratch out their epic on the basement wall. This is something that cannot be easily explained. It just is.<\/p>\n
Michael Schmidt wrote of Milton in Lives of the Poets<\/i>:<\/p>\nMilton was revered through two and a half centuries. Before Eliot tried to knock the bust off its plinth, only Doctor Johnson had expressed damaged 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That has certainly changed in the last 50 years or so, as these things often do, reflecting the ebb and flow of criticism. Milton is “in” now, back in, which means there is a wealth of information out there about him, with less of the chip on the shoulder that you find in earlier critiques of him. Milton was a poet from very early on, and his work went through many phases and upheavals. The great late works still come as a surprise, when you look at his work as a whole. He was political, moral, religious, could be a bit of a finger-wagger, but ultimately connected to the depths of the human condition. He can be conflicting. He is clearly interested in good and evil but he falls into the usual trap of making evil seem so … appealing. <\/p>\n
Schmidt writes: <\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s an interesting thing to contemplate. Milton’s work appears to address it directly.<\/p>\n
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
\nEngland hath need of thee: she is a fen
\nOf stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
\nFireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
\nHave forfeited their ancieng English dower
\nOf inward happiness. We are selfish men;
\nOh! raise us up, return to us again;
\nAnd give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
\nThy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
\nThou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
\nPure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
\nSo didst thou travel on life’s common way,
\nIn cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
\nThe lowliest duties on itself lay.
\n— Wordsworth<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
God I love the line: “Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart.”<\/p>\n
He was hugely involved in political life, dating from the start of the Civil War, and much of his work amounts to a propagandist for the Reformation. It was turbulent times. He was hired by the government for this purpose. When the Restoration happened, fears of reprisal were certainly present – he saw people being punished, etc. – but he was spared. Well, kind of. He did spend a bit of time in prison, but his high-level friends got him out. He was in the process of going blind at this time, and was totally devoid of sight by 1652. But, with all that he had already written, the great accomplishment was still ahead of him. The Commonwealth had been restored, perhaps leaving him a bit at odds’ end, and it was during that time that he wrote, in succession, Paradise Lost<\/i>, Paradise Regained<\/i> and Samson Agonistes<\/i>. He was a famous man, his name known across the world. He died in 1674. <\/p>\n
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of late-stage Milton:<\/p>\n
My mind 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<\/p>\n
… argue not
\nAgainst Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
\nOf heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
\nRight onward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
T.S. Eliot wrote:<\/p>\n
In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable … What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact<\/i> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A 20th century man analyzing a 17th century man.<\/p>\n
Schmidt writes:<\/p>\n
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 Fairie Queene<\/i>, 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<\/i> and the grand style. He finds it predictable: “routine gesture,” “heavy fall”, “monotony”… 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.”… 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 … 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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<\/i> 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<\/i> raises its head as in no other poet in the language. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Marvelous. I’ve always tried to separate content from opinion, or my “agreement” with the sentiments of the content from my opinion on whether or not such-and-such is a good poem. I posted a poem a while back by Carl Dennis<\/a> and a couple of people appeared to balk at it. The question of whether or not they liked the poem was wrapped up in their disagreement with the sentiment expressed. I think a good poem can often make you upset, or challenge you … often, that is the POINT. It’s how I like to read poems, anyway. The conversation in the comments section to that post kind of goes into that. It was a good conversation. Michael Schmidt, above, levels the charge at critics which I think is a fair one: You dislike the content<\/i>, but you don’t feel you can say that, so you go out of your way to decimate the verse for other<\/i> reasons. This is not to say that one cannot choose to dislike Milton. Of course. That’s your prerogative. But I still think that Schmidt is onto something there. <\/p>\nI’ll post a poem that ranks among my favorites of all time. My fear of losing my sight is so profound that it is hard to even admit to, because I feel like it will come true if I speak it out loud. <\/p>\n
And so …. echoing the earlier terrifying image of having to WAIT while your head is crammed full of Paradise Lost<\/i>, wait for your daughter to scribble it down for you, I’ll end with Milton’s sonnet to his own blindness.<\/p>\n
Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness<\/b><\/p>\n
When I consider how my light is spent,
\nEre half my days, in this dark world and wide,
\nAnd that one talent which is death to hide
\nLodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
\nTo serve therewith my Maker, and present
\nMy true account, lest He returning chide,
\n“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
\nI fondly ask; But patience, to prevent
\nThat murmur, soon replies “God doth not need
\nEither man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
\nBear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
\nIs kingly: thousands at His bidding speed
\nAnd post o’er land and ocean without rest;
\nThey also serve who only stand and wait.”<\/p>\n
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<\/i>, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine<\/p>\n