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The Temenos Academy THE TEMENOS ACADEMY “Thoughts and Reflections on Milton” Author: Jack Herbert Source: Temenos Academy Review 13 (2010) pp. 85-103 Published by The Temenos Academy Copyright © Jack Herbert, 2010 The Temenos Academy is a Registered Charity in the United Kingdom www.temenosacademy.org 085-103 Herbert Milton:Layout 1 30/10/10 18:20 Page 85 Thoughts and Reflections on Milton* Jack Herbert ith the four hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth last year, it Wis more than appropriate that we at Temenos try to assess his role and significance as one of the supreme poets of the English imagi - na tion whose influence has been immense—even when revoked, as in the case of Keats and his composition of Hyperion. And Milton today seems to be more back in fashion than perhaps at any other time since T. S. Eliot and the Cambridge School of Criticism tried to dislodge and demote him as one of this country’s very finest poets. Milton, then, is a controversial yet seminal figure in the field of Eng - lish studies, both poetry and culture—also, because of his alignment with the Puritan cause and his being Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, in the field of politics and religion. Indeed, this last area was certainly one that made him antipathetic to T. S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, even though (to be absolutely fair) Eliot can maintain that: Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with ‘Puri - tan’ literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are at fault partly in our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about the Puritans.1 And Marvell, although Puritan, certainly exemplifies wit, which involves playful intelligence, and is a staple of Marvell’s poetry, if not of Milton’s; which is nothing if not directly serious and, as we would say today, committed. In short, wit was associated with Donne and the Metaphysicals and by natural extension, of course, with the culture of the court, the upshot of which was that Milton’s poetry was by contrast viewed as being high-minded though solemn and possessing nothing of court sophistication at the level of linguistic complexity and ironic juxta - * This is the text of a lecture which was presented to the Temenos Academy on 5 November 2009. 1. ‘Andrew Marvell’ (1921), cited from Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), p. 294. 085-103 Herbert Milton:Layout 1 30/10/10 18:20 Page 86 86 jack herbert position; such as was found to inhabit in its own way the world of The Waste Land. Thus, a so-called ‘line of wit’ was found to run from Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Marvell to Pope, say, with some roots back in Shakespeare and other Elizabethans, leaving Milton high and dry, as well as the Romantics and Victorians; until we pick it up again with T. S. Eliot. So that, for the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis, Milton remains ‘that heroic figure’—a large yet anomalous landmark outside the main - stream of English poetry, with ‘his moral theme (being) held simply and presented with single-minded seriousness’. T. S. Eliot, again, coming from his early and prolonged study of Dante, of whom he says that ‘Dante’s is a visual imagination’, goes on to maintain later that ‘At no period is the visual imagination conspicu - ous in Milton’s poetry’, stressing instead ‘the auditory imagination’, which he believes stems from the poet’s weak eyesight and love of music: The most important fact about Milton, for my purpose, is his blindness . .. I do not mean that to go blind in middle life is itself enough to determine the whole nature of a man’s poetry. Blindness must be considered in conjunction with Milton’s personality and character . .. It must also be considered in connection with his devo- tion to, and expertness in, the art of music.2 As a result, T. S. Eliot argues, ‘To extract everything possible from Paradise Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely for the sound, and second for the sense’.3 This strikes me as being especially bizarre and certainly not conforming with my own reading experience; but it does illustrate T. S. Eliot’s own theory of there having been a so-called ‘dissociation of sensibility’ during the seventeenth century and Milton’s apparent role in all this: In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.4 2. ‘Milton I’ (1936), cited from On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), p. 139. 3. Ibid, p. 143. 4. ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), cited from Selected Essays, p. 288. 085-103 Herbert Milton:Layout 1 30/10/10 18:20 Page 87 thoughts and reflections on milton 87 This famous statement both suggests that Milton (and Dryden) were somehow victims of an overall cultural ‘dissociation’ as well as themselves massively contributing to it. The upshot of all this is that Milton’s verse is presented as being radically split down the middle, with thought and ideas on one side, music and magniloquence on the other. In terms of the latter, he is then demoted to a line of melli - fluous ness, incorporating Spenser, Shelley, Tennyson and Swinburne, which is opposed to the major so-called line of wit. As for Milton’s thought and ideas, these are dismissed as being unworthy of ‘solemn study’ (Leavis’s phrase), the give-away adjective indicating that such study is inappropriate to thought as heavy-handed as this, which is simply viewed as unwitty. Hence, not intelligent, a key adjective in 1950s Cambridge. With Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in mind, both epic creations, it is clear that we have an attack on what was known as the grand style, something which particularly attracted the Victorians, as in Tennyson’s description of Milton as that ‘God-gifted organ voice’. Not that Milton’s influence on the Victorians was at all especially positive, inculcating here simply a penchant for sublimity and uplift so different from the Romantics’ interest in creating epics of the inner world (as with Blake and Shelley), apart from responding to this poet’s figures of rebellion (e.g. Satan in Paradise Lost ). But this is the fault of the Victorians themselves for not being galvanized by Milton’s ideas. On the other hand, going back to T. S. Eliot and the Cambridge critics, Milton was also accused of a lack of sensuous particularity in his poetry. As Eliot puts it in his 1936 essay vis-à-vis Shakespeare in Macbeth: ‘In comparison, Milton’s images do not give this sense of parti cularity, nor are the separate words developed in significance. His language is, if one may use the term without disparagement, artificial and conventional.’5 This critique was then taken up elsewhere and applied in a fairly blanket manner. The first critic-scholar to reject this approach and reply in its own terms was Christopher Ricks of Oxford,6 who argued that the Miltonic style does possess its own kind of precision and particularity, and is not ‘incompatible with sharp, concrete realisation’ (F. R. Leavis’s for- mu la tion). Drawing on some insights of William Empson, Ricks shows 5. On Poetry and Poets, p. 140. 6. Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 085-103 Herbert Milton:Layout 1 30/10/10 18:20 Page 88 88 jack herbert via commentary and analysis that the verse of Paradise Lost, say, cannot simply be dismissed by pointing to (again quoting Leavis) ‘the inescapable monotony of the ritual’, ‘the stylised gesture and move- ment’, ‘mere orotundity’, or a ‘concern for mellifluousness’.7 And where as earlier scholar-critics such as C. S. Lewis tended to come back at Eliot and Leavis by maintaining that their principles of judgement were too narrow or wrong-headed (thereby setting up two separate aesthetic categories), Ricks attacks them on their own ground by accep ting their principles of sensuous particularity and sharp lin - guistic realization, but finding that Milton’s poetry does indeed pos- sess these qualities—at least in terms of its own subject-matter. Now in his prose-work, Eikonoclastes, Milton himself says that an opponent should not rely on ‘the plausibility of large and indefinite words, to defend himself at such a distance as may hinder the eye of common judgement from all distinct view and examination of his reasoning’; and from this Ricks correctly infers that the poet himself would not in the least object to being judged by Eliot’s and the Cam - bridge School’s criteria—which is precisely what Ricks does. Thus he argues that the poet’s style is not merely grandiloquent and sonorous– in Eliot’s terms, ‘the arrangement (of words) (being) for the sake of musical value, not for significance’—but sensitive, discriminating, loaded with meaning, imaginative and dramatic. Ricks then goes on to provide good practical critical exegeses of various passages from Para - dise Lost, paying a lot of attention both to the poet’s syntax and espe- cially his verbs, the New Critics having tended to ignore syntax and concentrate on precise imagery instead. In fact, Ricks’s concerns here would seem to fit in more with modern linguistics; T. S. Eliot and the Cambridge School with a more modernist and perhaps symbolist approach, minus, however, the transcendent auras of a Yeats, Rilke or Valéry.
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