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John Milton's Blank Verse and the Republican Spirit in Poetry

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John Milton's Blank Verse and the Republican Spirit in Poetry Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2000 John Milton’s Blank Verse The Granger Collection and the Republican Spirit in Poetry John Milton, with title pages of his epic by Paul B. Gallagher “Paradise Lost,” and tragedy “Samson Agonistes.” ercy Bysshe Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; Pwhen revolutionary movements shake peo- ple from their commonplace opinions, prejudices, and self-love, then the “legislation” of great poetry ton’s death (1674) until the American Revolution. It summons them toward truth and justice. In the was read in the American colonies from the pulpit period of the American Revolution and its after- like Scripture, used in the schoolroom like a math, the influence of “poet-legislator” John Milton primer, cited by political leaders, and read aloud was felt throughout the English-speaking world. and recited in homes. President John Adams wrote His poetry was most widely beloved among Ameri- of “the divine, immortal Milton,” that “[he] will cans, and a towering influence upon England’s convince any candid mind, that there is no good great “American” poets, Shelley and John Keats. government but what is republican.”1 John Quincy Milton died in poverty, blindness, and virtual Adams quoted in his speeches the man he called exile in 1674, after the failure of the English Com- simply, “the poet,” and whose poetry he had taught monwealth which he had served, and the British in his Harvard College lectures. oligarchy’s restoration of those degenerate “merry Milton’s “conclave in Pandemonium” in Paradise monarchs,” the Stuart kings. But, he lived on Lost—the conclave of the fallen angels thrust into through the great influence of his epic, Paradise Lost, particularly in colonial and revolutionary America, where it was thought uniquely to combine the beau- ty of poetry with the virtue of freedom. Reflections on the ‘American’ poets First published in 1667, Paradise Lost was the most powerful work of English poetry from Mil- John Keats and Percy Shelley 25 © 2000 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. Hell and become devils—became for American republi- ful, was built on the attacks on the poet by Dr. Samuel cans the defining metaphor of British aristocracy’s plots Johnson and Voltaire in the Eighteenth century, and by to subjugate them, and defined European oligarchism in the Stuart monarchs’ court poet John Dryden in the Sev- general, as titled and privileged Satanism. enteenth. All wanted to eradicate the influence of Par- Even more important was Milton’s influence, as adise Lost, chief among Milton’s great works. To Eliot, “poet-legislator,” upon other great Classical poets, in launching existentialist poetry in the 1920’s, Milton’s particular upon John Keats and the republican Shelley poetic style was “the great problem of our poetic sensibili- himself. To them, the “blank verse of Shakespeare and ty these two-and-one-half centuries.” More vitriolic, the Milton” was an ideal for which to strive—the most diffi- pro-Fascist Ezra Pound cursed America’s republican cult form of verse for the poet’s art to create; the easiest founders for their love of Milton: for the reader to recite beautifully, truthfully, naturally. Milton’s real place is closer to Drummond or Hawthorn- There is no rhyme to adorn the verses or to assist in den [a forgotten local poet] than to ‘Shakespeare and remembering them. But, without the distraction of Dante,’ whereto the stupidity of our forefathers tried to rhyme as a mental stop-sign at the end of each verse, the exalt him.”2 poet’s thought is free to flow suspended over many vers- es, changing and developing, yet holding the sustained They attacked, as we will see, the very poetic princi- attention of his audience. Like Shakespeare and Milton, ple that gave Milton’s blank verse its profound impact on Shelley knew that the greatest ideas of freedom and jus- the American poets of England, Shelley and Keats. tice, human intelligence and creativity, could be By pamphlets, speeches on education and religious expressed most beautifully in this form and those poetic freedom, poetry and diplomacy, John Milton was an forms most like it. inspirer of the English Commonwealth, and he is often Blank verse was considered ugly by the so-called Eng- damned with the Commonwealth’s failure under Oliv- lish Enlightenment, the two centuries between the life- er Cromwell, whose diplomatic secretary Milton was in times of Shakespeare and Shelley; as Shelley wrote, “Mil- the early 1650’s. In the aftermath, the “restored” Anglo- ton stood alone in the age that he illumined.” Enlighten- Dutch mercantile oligarchy retook a total grip on the ment poetry degenerated into little else but clever British Isles, reestablished the Anglican state-church rhyming, devoid of ideas or real passion. Court poets did worship Milton had hated and denounced, and not scruple to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s attempted to destroy the new republican institutions in epics all in rhyming couplets, until the originals became America. almost unknown. But in the American colonies, Milton had collabora- But to Shelley Milton was, with Homer and Dante tors, correspondents, and readers who regarded him as Alighieri, “the third among the sons of light”—epic poets more the Commonwealth than Cromwell. These includ- of the rise of mankind and of mankind’s best creation, ed Connecticut Governor John Winthrop, Jr., the Rev. the republic, as Shelley expressed this in his poem Hugh Peters of Massachusetts, leader of Boston’s minis- “Adonais”: ters including John Cotton and his grandson Cotton Mather; and Roger Williams of Rhode Island. The —He died, Mather family library contained all Milton’s works; their Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, protégé Benjamin Franklin, when he established his first Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride, Philadelphia bookshop, sold Milton’s writings and urged The priest, the slave, and the liberticide, that they be used in the schools. Later, in the 1760’s and Trampled and mocked with many a loathèd rite 1770’s, when Jonathan Mayhew and other Massachusetts Of lust and blood; he went unterrified, ministers were preaching American freedom and inde- Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite Yet reigns o’er earth; the third among the sons of light. pendence, they preached from Milton’s works, both Par- adise Lost and his works on civil and church freedom. Mayhew wrote, in a letter of 17603: An Unacknowledged Legislator If I understand Milton’s principles, they are these. That government, at least our government, is by compact. That a In the Twentieth century, Milton became once again an king becoming a tyrant and the compact thereby broken, unacknowledged legislator, the effect of the promotion of the power reverts again to the constituents, the people, who the attacks on him by the “existentialist” poets, led by the may punish such a tyrant as they see fit, and constitute such Tory T.S. Eliot and the pro-Mussolini Fascist Ezra a new form of government as shall then appear to them to Pound. Their anti-Milton campaign, while more success- be most expedient. 26 School texts published in the revolutionary decades beauty of the line is found in its longer context, and his abil- drew on Milton to teach public speaking and writing, ity to work in larger musical units than any other poet— religion, and morality. Still later, in the 1790’s, the Feder- that is the most conclusive evidence of Milton’s supreme alists fought the Jacobin Clubs, which had sprung up in mastery. imitation of the anarchy of the French Jacobins and through manipulations by their agents. In this fight, the We will see later how laughable Eliot’s “attack” on portrayal of the devils’ conclave in Paradise Lost was used this, wherein he complains that Milton’s poetry must be as a metaphor for the Jacobins’ targetting of the new read once for the music—the sound—, and then back American republic. through again, this time for the meaning; as if the human mind were incapable of such a sweep of beautiful thought. The blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton Master Musician made poetry’s essence clear: not sound, rhyme, rhythm, or other adornments; but the beautiful expression of When Percy Shelley was eighteen, and coming under ideas, metaphors expressed as freely as powerfully, in a the influence of all these “sons of light,” future American meter of verses which measures the rate of change and President John Quincy Adams published the Lectures on development of thought. Here is an example from Par- Rhetoric and Oratory (1810) which he had given for sever- adise Lost, an extended image of the mind of Satan as he al years at Harvard College. He drew on Milton’s works steals into the Garden of Eden. Not just the beginning of to show the power of classical speech, as his father had each verse, but more especially the end, is an emphatic done to show the principles of religious freedom. John word yet nearly always projected into the next verse as Quincy Adams focussed on that quality of Milton’s writ- well: ing which had drawn the attacks of Samuel Johnson and the Enlightenment’s leading lights. This was Milton’s Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth unique ability to express a single, strong poetic idea over Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,* many verses “without stopping” (at the verse-endings), And like a devilish Engin back recoiles yet still give poetic music to those verses, still give distinct Upon himself; horror and doubt distract force to the beginnings and endings of the lines.
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