{"id":45139,"date":"2011-12-09T11:30:26","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T16:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=45139"},"modified":"2022-10-13T12:40:43","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T16:40:43","slug":"happy-birthday-john-milton-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=45139","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, John Milton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Milton! thou should\u2019st 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\u2019s common way,
\nIn cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
\nThe lowliest duties on itself lay.<\/p>\n

— William Wordsworth<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/i> – W.H. Auden<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Milton was born in 1608, and although he left Oxford without completing his degree, he remained a thinker and a scholar till the end of his days. He was not a poet in an ivory tower; that wasn’t really what was “in”, anyway, at the time. The isolated poet would come in with the Romantics. Milton was a public man, a propagandist for the Commonwealth (a dangerous position, especially once the Restoration happened), a political man, addressing all kinds of “unpoetic” social and civil issues. He was very much involved in the current-day upheaval of the time. He was famous in his own day. His reputation since then has risen and fallen with the tides, and we are now in a huge Milton upsurge. The dude turned 400 a couple of years ago, and there were celebrations across the city: art exhibits, library exhibits, and also a costume-party in Brooklyn where you had to dress up as either Milton himself, or a character from Paradise Lost<\/i>. <\/p>\n

I personally had to read Paradise Lost<\/a>\"\"<\/i> in high school and thought it was the most boring thing I had ever read in my life. I basically had to prop my eyeballs open to get through it. I re-read it about 10 years ago, as an adult, and it felt like the top of my head exploded trying to comprehend not only the thoughts\/philosophy in the great work, but also the depths and transcendence of the language. I almost feel like teenagers should be FORCED to re-read what they were made to read in high school. <\/p>\n

Milton traveled widely early on, and most of his writing was meant for public consumption, he was not a private scribbler. He wrote political and religious tracts and philosophical works, what amounts to op-ed columns for the people trying to understand and keep up with what was happening to the constitution in England at that time. He also wrote poetry privately; he had been writing poetry since he was a young boy.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Rosen, in his wonderful New Yorker article<\/a> about the continuing relevance of Milton, writes:<\/p>\n

Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old – his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, Paradise Lost,<\/i> all lay before him. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into Paradise Lost,<\/i> where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, Areopagitica,<\/i> Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”<\/p>\n

Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter – it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman – there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe. Milton depicted the earth hanging fixed from a golden chain, and when he contemplated the heavens he saw God enthroned and angels warring. The sense of the new and the old colliding forms part of Milton’s complex aura. The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box, but he is far more our contemporary than Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven. Nobody would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work. Though Paradise Lost<\/i> is a dilation on a moment in Genesis, it contains passages so personal that you cannot read far without knowing that the author was a blind man fallen on “evil days.” Even in his political prose, Milton will pause to tell us that he is really not all that short, despite what his enemies say. Though he coined the name “Pandemonium”, all the demons for the palace that Satan and his fallen crew build in Hell, he also coined the word “self-esteem,” as contemporary a concept as there is and one that governed much of Milton’s life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing: here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Poet Walter Savage Landor wrote:<\/p>\n

Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
\nOver the highest Alps of mind he marches,
\nAnd far below him spring the baseless arches
\nOf Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He lost most of his public standing when the Restoration came, although he didn’t experience the harsh reprisals that many others did. He was blind by that point, and his great works, the works that would put him in the history books for all time, were still ahead of him. Milton’s “sonnet to his blindness” is a searingly truthful poem (especially if you fear going totally blind), and it is a poem I have turned to in my darkest hours. <\/p>\n

Sonnet: On His Blindness<\/strong>
\nWhen I consider how my light is spent,
\n Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
\n And that one talent which is death to hide,
\n Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
\nTo serve therewith my maker, and present
\n My true account, lest he returning chide,
\n Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
\n I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
\nThat murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
\n Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
\n Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state
\nIs kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
\n And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
\n They also serve who only stand and wait.<\/p>\n

He dictated Paradise Lost<\/i> to his daughter, a fact that makes my entire brain go blank.<\/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 an 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<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Milton 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

Milton was political, moral, religious, could be a bit of a finger-wagger, but ultimately he was connected to the depths of the human condition. He was clearly interested in good and evil but he falls into the usual trap of making evil seem so … appealing. The same thing happens in films time without number, where you can’t help it … you start rooting for the bad guy. The “good guy” is too boring. Milton seemed to understand the appeal of evil, and the appeal of the fallen angel.<\/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

The Commonwealth had been restored, perhaps leaving Milton a bit at odds’ end, and it was during that time that he wrote, in succession, Paradise Lost<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, Paradise Regained<\/a>\"\"<\/i> and Samson Agonistes<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. <\/p>\n

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

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

I’ve always tried to separate content from opinion, or my “agreement” with the sentiments <\/em>of the content from my opinion on whether or not it 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 never mentioned in their disagreement with the sentiment expressed within the poem. They could not see past their disagreement<\/i> (which, in my opinion, means you miss out on so much that this world has to offer). Who cares if you agree\/disagree? You are irrelevant. Do you LIKE the poem? 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. 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 outright, 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. <\/p>\n

In the introduction to my copy of Paradise Lost<\/i>, written by Edward Le Comte, he writes:<\/p>\n

Out of the ruins and out of the darkness Milton brought Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained<\/i>, and Samson Agonistes<\/i> – a long epic, a short epic, and a Greek tragedy, all without rivals in the language. It was a miracle of the spirit – of, he intimated, the Holy Spirit, for he was strong and insistent in his belief in the sacredness of his inspiration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is a part of Paradise Lost<\/i> from Book One, with that hot and attractive Satan calling upon his followers.<\/p>\n

Paradise Lost<\/big><\/p>\n

Thus Satan talking to his neerest Mate
\nWith Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes
\nThat sparkling blaz’d, his other Parts besides
\nProne on the Flood, extended long and large
\nLay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
\nAs whom the Fables name of monstrous size,
\nTITANIAN, or EARTH-BORN, that warr’d on JOVE,
\nBRIARIOS or TYPHON, whom the Den
\nBy ancient TARSUS held, or that Sea-beast
\nLEVIATHAN, which God of all his works
\nCreated hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:
\nHim haply slumbring on the NORWAY foam
\nThe Pilot of some small night-founder’d Skiff,
\nDeeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell,
\nWith fixed Anchor in his skaly rind
\nMoors by his side under the Lee, while Night
\nInvests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes:
\nSo stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
\nChain’d on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
\nHad ris’n or heav’d his head, but that the will
\nAnd high permission of all-ruling Heaven
\nLeft him at large to his own dark designs,
\nThat with reiterated crimes he might
\nHeap on himself damnation, while he sought
\nEvil to others, and enrag’d might see
\nHow all his malice serv’d but to bring forth
\nInfinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
\nOn Man by him seduc’t, but on himself
\nTreble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour’d.
\nForthwith upright he rears from off the Pool
\nHis mighty Stature; on each hand the flames
\nDrivn backward slope their pointing spires, & rowld
\nIn billows, leave i’th’ midst a horrid Vale.
\nThen with expanded wings he stears his flight
\nAloft, incumbent on the dusky Air
\nThat felt unusual weight, till on dry Land
\nHe lights, if it were Land that ever burn’d
\nWith solid, as the Lake with liquid fire;
\nAnd such appear’d in hue, as when the force
\nOf subterranean wind transports a Hill
\nTorn from PELORUS, or the shatter’d side
\nOf thundring AETNA, whose combustible
\nAnd fewel’d entrals thence conceiving Fire,
\nSublim’d with Mineral fury, aid the Winds,
\nAnd leave a singed bottom all involv’d
\nWith stench and smoak: Such resting found the sole
\nOf unblest feet. Him followed his next Mate,
\nBoth glorying to have scap’t the STYGIAN flood
\nAs Gods, and by their own recover’d strength,
\nNot by the sufferance of supernal Power. <\/p>\n

“Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,”
\nSaid then the lost Arch Angel, “this the seat
\nThat we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
\nFor that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
\nWho now is Sovran can dispose and bid
\nWhat shall be right: fardest from him is best
\nWhom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
\nAbove his equals. Farewel happy Fields
\nWhere Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
\nInfernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
\nReceive thy new Possessor: One who brings
\nA mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
\nThe mind is its own place, and in it self
\nCan make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
\nWhat matter where, if I be still the same,
\nAnd what I should be, all but less then hee
\nWhom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
\nWe shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
\nHere for his envy, will not drive us hence:
\nHere we may reign secure, and in my choyce
\nTo reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
\nBetter to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
\nBut wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
\nTh’ associates and copartners of our loss
\nLye thus astonisht on th’ oblivious Pool,
\nAnd call them not to share with us their part
\nIn this unhappy Mansion, or once more
\nWith rallied Arms to try what may be yet
\nRegaind in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell?”<\/p>\n

So SATAN spake, and him BEELZEBUB
\nThus answer’d. “Leader of those Armies bright,
\nWhich but th’ Omnipotent none could have foyld,
\nIf once they hear that voyce, their liveliest pledge
\nOf hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
\nIn worst extreams, and on the perilous edge
\nOf battel when it rag’d, in all assaults
\nTheir surest signal, they will soon resume
\nNew courage and revive, though now they lye
\nGroveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire,
\nAs we erewhile, astounded and amaz’d,
\nNo wonder, fall’n such a pernicious highth.”<\/p>\n

He scarce had ceas’t when the superiour Fiend
\nWas moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
\nEthereal temper, massy, large and round,
\nBehind him cast; the broad circumference
\nHung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
\nThrough Optic Glass the TUSCAN Artist views
\nAt Ev’ning from the top of FESOLE,
\nOr in VALDARNO, to descry new Lands,
\nRivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
\nHis Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
\nHewn on NORWEGIAN hills, to be the Mast
\nOf some great Ammiral, were but a wand,
\nHe walkt with to support uneasie steps
\nOver the burning Marle, not like those steps
\nOn Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime
\nSmote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire;
\nNathless he so endur’d, till on the Beach
\nOf that inflamed Sea, he stood and call’d
\nHis Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t
\nThick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
\nIn VALLOMBROSA, where th’ ETRURIAN shades
\nHigh overarch’t imbowr; or scatterd sedge
\nAfloat, when with fierce Winds ORION arm’d
\nHath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew
\nBUSIRIS and his MEMPHIAN Chivalrie,
\nVVhile with perfidious hatred they pursu’d
\nThe Sojourners of GOSHEN, who beheld
\nFrom the safe shore their floating Carkases
\nAnd broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
\nAbject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
\nUnder amazement of their hideous change.
\nHe call’d so loud, that all the hollow Deep
\nOf Hell resounded. “Princes, Potentates,
\nWarriers, the Flowr of Heav’n, once yours, now lost,
\nIf such astonishment as this can sieze
\nEternal spirits; or have ye chos’n this place
\nAfter the toyl of Battel to repose
\nYour wearied vertue, for the ease you find
\nTo slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav’n?
\nOr in this abject posture have ye sworn
\nTo adore the Conquerour? who now beholds
\nCherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood
\nWith scatter’d Arms and Ensigns, till anon
\nHis swift pursuers from Heav’n Gates discern
\nTh’ advantage, and descending tread us down
\nThus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts
\nTransfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.
\nAwake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.”<\/p>\n

\n