John Milton: the early works

II MICHAEL WILDING John Milton: the early works It would be difficult and indeed absurd to approach Milton's poetry without an awareness of his revolutionary commitment. One of the foremost polemicists against the bishops, the monarchy, and the rest of the baggage of the old order, he became Latin secretary to the republican Council of State and official propagandist of the new regime with his great Defences of the English people. After the Restoration his life was in danger, he was imprisoned and some of the books that he wrote were burned.1 Yet when we turn to his first book of Poems, the political, the revolutionary are not the immediate impression we receive.2 Certainly the volume includes early work dating from before the revolutionary years. Yet the collection was published in 1645, after the conclusion of the first phase of the Civil War and at a point when Milton had already published polemical and increasingly radical prose tracts - Of Reformation in England (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Areopagitica (1644).3 It is possible to extract revolutionary sentiments from the poems. But the dominant concern is poetry itself and the pursuit of the proper subject of poetry. What is poetry about, what are its concerns, what are its themes, what are its possibilities and limitations? Throughout Milton's early poems the subjects of poetry, music, and song are recurrent. They are there in the topics - 'At a Solemn Music' - in the types of poet — Shakespeare, Lycidas, Orpheus — and in the images of the sirens and the music of the spheres. Arthur Barker remarked of the recurrence of the music of the spheres in Milton's poetry that 'the force with which this idea struck Milton's imagination is indicated by the fact that from the "Ode [on the Morning of Christ's Nativity]" to "Lycidas" he was almost incapable of writing on a serious subject without introducing the music'.4 The seven spheres of the creation rotated around each other: mounted on each was a siren who sang and the interwoven notes of the sphere inhabiting sirens created this ideal music that, since the Fall, is no Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING longer audible to humanity. Importantly, the music of the spheres is anthropomorphized: for Milton it is not a mechanical music produced by the spheres' rotation. The sirens actively sing it. And their singing it involves words, not only music. The music of the spheres is presented as ideal, transcendent song; but this ideal music has a verbal content. The verbal component is important for Milton as it allows for a parallel with poetry; it is not wordless music. 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' presents us with the shepherds 'Simply chatting in a rustic row': When such music sweet Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortal finger struck, Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took. (lines 93S)5 The voice answers the strings. There is a duality, which we find again in 'At a Solemn Music': Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'n's joy, Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ, (lines 1—3) The two sirens here represent voice and verse: that is, they represent music and words, song and substance. Milton is not celebrating a transcendental condition of musical abstraction, but stressing the duality of music and words, beauty and substance, form and content. The solemn music contains a message: the Cherubic host in thousand choirs Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms, Hymns devout and holy Psalms Singing everlastingly. (lines 12—16) Milton's concept of this perfection is of a musical experience that is also a verbal experience. The beauty of the musical is wed to the meaning of the words. 6 These are hymns, psalms, songs. The collection of these early poems contains translations of two psalms which serve as adducible evidence so there can be no doubt. The psalms are content laden. They are about something. Not only is this ideal model of earthly poetry content laden, it is also actively consciousness changing. Divine poetry is a practical poetry, concerned with changing the human condition: Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS Ring out ye Crystal spheres Once bless our human ears, (lines 125—6) the poet implores in 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity': For if such holy Song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And speckl'd vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold, And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. Yea, Truth and Justice then Will down return to men. (lines 133—42) Milton's Sirens, it can be seen, are very different from the sirens of Tzvetan Todorov: The Sirens have the most beautiful voices in the world, and their song is the most beautiful - without being very different from the bard's . . . one cannot leave the bard so long as he sings; the Sirens are like a bard who never stops singing. The song of the Sirens, then, is a higher degree of poetry, of the poet's art. Here we must note especially Odysseus' description of it. What is this irresistible song about, which unfailingly makes those who hear it die, so great is its allure? It is a song about itself. The Sirens say only one thing: that they are singing.7 This is the anti-type of the Miltonic sirens and Miltonic poetry. But this is, of course, all highly conceptual. Milton cannot hear the music of the spheres any more than we can; it is inaudible to fallen humanity. He can only describe the idea of it, not even paraphrase it. The existence of the music of the spheres is affirmed in 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and is the sustained subject of seven stanzas. But what it is can only be gestured at. It has a message, it alters consciousness, it is not a song about itself. But the problem remains for the poet who wishes to approach it of what the proper message is. The poet experiences the poetic impulse, but to what should it be applied? What is poetry for, what is poetry about, what is the proper subject of poetry? This is the concern that runs through Milton's first volume. There is no doubt that the divine music be wed to words: that is never in dispute. But the recurrent anxiety is the search for the suitable theme. It is remarkable how many of the poems in this first collection were written for specific occasions, written in response to invitations, commis223 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING sions, opportunities. 8 Whether Milton was invited to contribute 'On Shakespeare' to the Second Folio of Shakespeare's plays, or saw and seized an opportunity is unknown: but it is certainly a poem that appeared alongside other tributes, as did 'Lycidas'. The epitaphs on the Marchioness of Winchester and on the Cambridge carrier Hobson are likewise occasional pieces. The poems on Christ's nativity, the passion, and the circumcision may not be occasional in the sense of having been commissioned, but they mark occasions in the Christian year. They are self-commissioned by a poet who saw his art as something to be applied to a fit subject. Not everything in the collection is occasional, of course; but this occasional note is dominant. This is clear if we contrast it with the alternative model of 'sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child', whom we see in 'L'Allegro' 'warble his native Wood-notes wild' (lines 133—4). This may not be a wholly accurate characterization of Shakespeare's procedure, but it certainly presents an anti-type to Milton's own practice. His 1645 volume is not one that offers a spontaneous expression of powerful emotion. These are not lyric outpourings. Even the sonnets are frequently responses to events and occasions — the approaching army, a birthday. The poems arise when an occasion or opportunity presents itself, when there is a function for the poet. It is necessary to stress this concern with the proper subject and occasion of poetry that Milton shows before discussing that recurrent concern of his poetry: the concern with poetry itself. These are consistently poems about poetry. Poetry and the figure of the poet recur time and time again. But this is not that simple preoccupation beloved of theorists of postmodernism, poetic self-referentialism. There is a strong self-referentialism, but this is only one of the dialectical poles of Milton's art: against it stands the search for the proper subject. Poetry's concern with itself is an endemic feature of poetry, and something that the poet has to keep in place: this self-concern with the art has to be wed to a concern with content — with the world and the divine. The opening poem of the collection, 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', opens with the poet's concern with his poetic art: Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God? Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain, (lines 15—18) To welcome him to this his new abode ... These are not the very first lines. The poet is not that narcissistically selfpreoccupied. The first lines establish the time in the Christian year: This is the Month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King, Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born . . . (lines 1—3) 224 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS Nonetheless, the poet's concern with poetry is rapidly introduced. The poet questions the muse, discussing the possibility of writing an appropriate poem for the occasion. The setting is of the poet meditating on his art. He sees: The Star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet: O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at his blessed feet; Have thou the honor first, thy Lord to greet, And join thy voice unto the Angel Choir. (lines 23—7) And then we are offered 'The Hymn'. 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' is not properly characterized by its usual short title, 'The Nativity Ode'. The poem is twofold: the four stanzas of invocation and poetic self-consciousness, followed by the twenty-seven stanzas of 'the hymn', the 'humble ode' (line 24). The 'ode' is prefaced by the poet's concern with his poetic art, which is also a part of the poem. The 'humble ode' is offered as an example of the poetic concern, a tentative, 'humble' possibility. There is a similar twofold structure in 'Lycidas', the poem which closes the English, non-dramatic section of the collection, where a concluding octave places the 'monody': Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th'Oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray; He touch't the tender stops of various Quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay. (lines 186—9) The 'doric lay' of lament is followed by the placing, self-referential lines of the full poem in which the nature of the lay is announced and distanced. We are offered in these opening and closing items not innocent poems, selfcontained, unselfconscious effusions, but two works concerned to indicate and place their own nature and strategies. The 'humble ode' and 'doric lay' are framed by the poet's highly self-conscious dramatization of their situation. These are poems within poems. But they are not self-referential poems concerned only with themselves and their art. That self-concern is there; but the ode and lay have their own subjects - Christ's nativity, Lycidas' death. With 'The Passion' we have a variant on this procedure. Here there is no framed ode or lay. All we have is the statement of intention: For now to sorrow must I tune my song, And set my Harp to notes of saddest woe. (lines 8—9) But the announced song is never delivered. A concluding note tells us 'This Subject the Author finding to be above the years he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinisht.' 225 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING It may well be that at some level the author was 'nothing satisfied with what was begun,' but at another level the failure is a mark of the poem's success. How could a mortal poet ever replicate Christ's passion? The enormity of the theme is such that it transcends human poetic ability, however many years the poet might have. There is an appropriate inevitability about the way the poet breaks off. It is a large-scale version of that device of classical rhetoric, anacolouthon, that Milton exploits in the first speech in Paradise Lost when Beelzebub first addresses Satan: 'If thou beest he; But O how fall'n !' (1.84) Beelzebub breaks off, the opening sentence uncompleted; it is a traditional device for expressing passion. Is 'The Passion' incomplete? Or was it conceived as a broken fragment? The poem is even more than 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and 'Lycidas' preoccupied with the problem of writing a poem. Its theme is the difficulty of poetically comprehending the passion rather than the passion itself. It opens with a remembrance of the earlier poem on the nativity: Erewhile of Music and Ethereal mirth, Wherewith the stage of Air and Earth did ring, And joyous news of heav'nly Infant's birth, My muse with Angels did divide to sing; But headlong joy is ever on the wing, In Wintry solstice like the short'n'd light Soon swallow'd up in dark and long outliving night, (lines 1—7) This first stanza sums up the poem's procedure: a reference to previous achievement, and then joy 'swallow'd up in dark and long outliving night', the darkness that takes over from the poetic impulse and engulfs the attempt. This is the poem in miniature. The second stanza announces intention — 'For now to sorrow must I tune my song' (line 8) — and again concludes in incompletion, failure: 'labors huge and hard, too hard for human wight' (line 14). Christ's labours are implicitly paralleled with the poetic labour on the theme of Christ's labours - 'too hard for human wight'. There is an appropriate poetic self-reference, a symmetry of proclaimed theme and poetic methodology. The inadequacy of poet and poetry is the foregrounded theme: These latter scenes confine my roving verse, To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound. (lines 22—3) My sorrows are too dark for day to know: The leaves should all be black whereon I write, And letters where my tears have washt, a wannish white. (lines 33-5) 226 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS The verbal tenses become conditional, hypothetical: Yet on the soft'ned Quarry would I score My plaining verse as lively as before; For sure so well instructed are my tears, That they would fitly fall in order'd Characters. Or should I thence hurried on viewless wing, Take up a weeping on the Mountains wild. (lines 46—51) This is not like the achieved poem on the nativity that he can confidently look back to. Nor is it the stumbling approach to the passion with which he began. Now the concern is what I would write (if I could), what I should do to write (if it were possible). Significantly, whereas in 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and 'Lycidas' Milton invoked the muse for help, he does not do so here. He writes of having had the assistance of the muses in stanza 1, but makes no attempt to invoke them here. It is as if from the beginning he is committed to failure; or committed to demonstrating that the merely mortal poetic skills must fail on such a theme, just as mere mankind would fail in such a situation as the passion. So we have the mortal song, like the prefatory stanzas to the 'humble ode' on Christ's nativity, or the concluding octave to 'Lycidas'. But the divine song remains an absence, the inexpressible. It is a theme 'too hard for human wight'. This thematic absence is given confirmation by the poem that follows in the 1645 edition, 'On Time'. The subject again is absence, what is lost and erased by time: 'glut thyself with what thy womb devours' (line 4). But here absence is turned back on itself. Time's capacity for destruction provides the triumphant conclusion in which time will destroy itself and erase its own destructive powers: When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall climb, Then all this Earthy grossness quit, Attir'd with Stars, we shall for ever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time. (lines 19-23) The poem concludes with that affirmation of resurrection and eternal life that 'The Passion' 'should have' reached, that is the ultimate purpose and meaning of Christ's passion. The music of the spheres is a recurrent image in Milton's early poems. But it is not an accessible model for the mortal poet. As a touchstone of an ideal, or as a model of what might apocalyptically be regained, it has its practical function. But for an immediate model of poetic practice. Milton 227 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING had to turn to other concepts. The poet-prophet is one that particularly appealed. 9 The seven stanzas dealing with the music of the spheres and the divine song of the heavenly choir in 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' are succeeded by seven stanzas (19—25) on the prophetic mode. 10 Again they are in the context of negation. Just as 'wisest Fate says no, / This must not yet be so' (lines 149—50), to the restorative effect of the music of the spheres, so the oracles are denied their oracular powers: 'The Oracles are dumb' (line 173). These are the classical oracles, superseded by the new testament of Christ. To devote seven stanzas to the silencing of the oracles, to the failure of oracular power, is consciously paradoxical. But this emphasis on loss, this powerful negation, nonetheless firmly establishes the idea of the prophetic as a one-time human possibility. The new prophets, the new prophet-poets, will draw their inspiration from Christian divinity, not from Apollo at Delphos: Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell. (lines 176-80) It is a beautiful, haunting picture of loss. The failure of inspiration, the loss of poetic powers through death, the failure of achievement in the passing of time, were themes that powerfully engaged Milton. The anxiety of nonperformance inspired his most memorable early performances — here, in 'Lycidas', in 'On Time', and in Sonnet 7, 'How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth'. There is a paradox here, a paradox that in the Christian context is, of course, no paradox. Classical inspiration may now be lost forever: but the death of the classical gods, or at least their defeat, is at the same time the moment of the triumph of the Christian. It is a type of the central Christian mystery, the resurrection. The Christian poet will be a better prophet than any of those who went before. And so, with a more than witty self-referentialism, at the moment of writing about prophetic powers, Milton achieves prophecy. The parade of the defeated, superseded gods and priests is the parade of the defeated Catholics, extirpated by the Reformation, and of the Anglican bishops, disestablished by the English Revolution, and the ejected corrupted clergy: In vain with timbrel'd Anthems dark The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark. (lines 219—20) Priests, anthems, sable stoles: these apply not only to the classical world but 228 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS to the immediate context. But the Anglican bishops were not removed until 1642, and Milton wrote these lines — as is pointedly noted after the title of the poem, in 1629. The inclusion of the date of composition in the title is important; it demonstrates that he had achieved the power of prophecy. In the act of writing about the superseded classical prophetic oracles, he attained a divine pre-vision of the defeat of the corrupted clergy that was to come. It is a self-referentialism that transcends the limitations of the selfreferential and reaches outward to society. In the poem within the poem he writes about types of the poet; and in writing of the prophetic type he attains prophetic powers himself. These same powers are achieved in 'Lycidas', as he spells out in the headnote to the poem: it 'by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted Clergy then in their height'. 'How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, Enough of such as for their bellies' sake, Creep and intrude and climb into the fold? Of other care they little reck'ning make, Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, And shove away the worthy bidden guest; Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least That to the faithful Herdman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped'. (lines 113—22) It is one of the great impassioned political tirades in English poetry, 'an expression of the same spirit which had been long making itself heard in the Puritan pulpit and which was at the moment clamoring in the reckless pamphlets of Prynne and Lilburne', as William Haller put it.11 And the prophecy is there in the retribution threatened, that was meted out in the revolution with the abolition of the bishops and the ejection of clergy: 'But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.' (lines 130—1) It is not an isolated digression in its preoccupations. The political note is there from the very beginning of 'Lycidas', the opening phrase 'Yet once more' bringing an apocalyptic threat from the Epistle to the Hebrews 12:25—7, 'now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.' 12 Imminent social upheaval, the world turned upside down, is proclaimed immediately. The later request 229 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING 'Look homeward Angel now' (line 163) carries a further radical implication: St Michael is implored to turn away from facing Spain, the traditional Catholic enemy whose armada had been defeated fifty years earlier, and to 'look homeward' at the reactionary enemy within - the Laudian church and the Stuart attempt at absolutist rule. 13 'Lycidas' ends with an allusion to Revelation 7:17, 'wipe away all tears from their eyes', an implication of apocalyptic change shortly to come in the society at large, an implication reinforced in the poem's final line, 'tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new' (line 193). It is a vision of social hope, a determinedly positive ending. As well as the 'corrupted Clergy', the speech denounces those other figures categorizable as bad shepherds. Bad academics are surely included: academics necessarily took holy orders, and the context of Cambridge with the shared studies of Lycidas and 'the uncouth Swain', and Camus's speech, firmly indicate such a context. At the same time, bad poets are indicted. 'And when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw.' (lines 123—4) Although the revolutionary indictment of the 'corrupted Clergy' is the foregrounded reading, thanks to Milton's headnote, the political does not exclude the poetic. 14 Indeed, the poetic and political are inseparable. The poets are bad poets for the same reason the clergy are bad clergy and the academics are bad academics — their words lack substance. They deliver not religious or political truths, but empty wind that inflates and sickens their listeners: 'The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.' (lines 125—7) 'L'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' of all the poems in the 1645 volume are the closest to the lyric expression of mood and emotion. They have always been curiously resistant to interpretation. 15 After we have pointed to their contrasting moods, what else can be said of them? Indeed, even to characterize their 'moods' is difficult: what English words translate their titles? They share with the other poems of the volume, however, the preoccupation with poetry and the subject of poetry. This component gradually reveals itself. Just before the mid-point of 'L'Allegro' 'the Milkmaid singeth blithe' (line 6s), And every Shepherd tells his tale Under the Hawthorn in the dale. (lines 67—8) As evening comes on folk tales are told: 230 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS Then to the Spicy Nut-brown Ale, With stories told of many a feat, How Faery Mab the junkets eat; She was pincht and pull'd, she said, And he, by Friar's Lantern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his Cream-bowl duly set. (lines 100—6) When these tales are done, we move to more literary creations: Such sights as youthful Poets dream On Summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned Sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, Warble his native Wood-notes wild. And ever against eating Cares, Lap me in soft Lydian Airs, Married to immortal verse. (lines 129-37) The poem ends with a figure recurrent in the Miltonic pantheon, that type of the poet, Orpheus: Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony; That Orpheus' self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heapt Elysian flow'rs, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half-regain'd Eurydice. These delights if thou canst give, Mirth, with thee I mean to live. (lines 143—52) 'These delights' have by the poem's end become quite clearly defined as the delights of poetry itself. 'II Penseroso' likewise reveals a preoccupation with the poetic arts: And join with thee calm Peace and Quiet, Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet, And hears the Muses in a ring Aye round about Jove's Altar sing. (lines 45—8) The absent song of the nightingale is invoked, and though it remains absent it is nonetheless evoked into hypothetical being, into literary being. Again it is a play of absence, the bird unheard, the poet unseen: 2.31 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING Sweet Bird that shunn'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy! Thee Chantress oft the Woods among, I woo to hear thy Even-Song; And missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven Green. (lines 61—6) At the centre of 'II Penseroso' is the poetic tower, site of mystical communion and poetic creation, and a creation linked with mystical divinatory understanding, prophetic powers: Or let my Lamp at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely Tow'r, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato to unfold What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook. (lines 85—92) Rapidly we move on to 'Gorgeous Tragedy' (line 97), 'the tale of Troy divine' (line 100) and, yet once more, Orpheus: Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as, warbled to the string, Drew Iron tears down Pluto's cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek. (lines 105-8) It is, notice, once again an affective, effective poetry. Orpheus's song achieves something. 16 The survey of poetic possibility is extensive and comprehensive. There are the 'great Bards' (line 116), 'Anthems clear' (lines 163) and finally as the poem's conclusion, the poet-prophet: Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every Star that Heav'n doth shew, And every Herb that sips the dew; Till old experience do attain To something like Prophetic strain. These pleasures Melancholy give, And I with thee will choose to live. (lines 170—6) The presence of Hermes and Plato at the centre of 'II Penseroso' is emphatic and serious. There is no lack of conventionally literary reference in these twin poems. But for Milton the true literary needs more than the literary. The poet must know the literary, and his work is steeped in allusion and 232 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS reference. The mention of the bards reminds us that the training for the bards was a committal to memory of the entire bardic tradition. But as well as the literary, the poet must also have knowledge, divine knowledge.17 There is no point in being a poet unless you have something to say, unless the literary skills are married to content. Technique is essential but not an end in itself. Plato might seem an odd inclusion for those whose immediate association is of Plato's excluding poets from the Republic. But the Plato the seventeenth century loved was the Plato of the Phaedrus, not the political but the spiritual philosopher. Plato and Hermes Trismegistus are here as sources of spiritual wisdom. More than that: they are guides for access to spiritual insight by meditation and spiritual communion: And of those Daemons that are found In fire, air, flood, or underground, Whose power hath a true consent With Planet, or with element. (lines 93—6) For all the knowledge of authorities and tradition, finally the poet needs inspiration, the cooperation of the muses. It is a traditional belief, of course. But this commitment to spiritual inspiration is absolutely subversive of traditional authority. To draw inspiration from the muse rather than from the library and the rulebook is to reject authority and the rules. Inspiration became the ideology of the radicals during the revolutionary period. A commitment to being moved by spirit was a mark of the radically subversive. After the Restoration the poets of the new order like Dryden, Davenant, and Butler were concerned to mock, discredit, and dismiss the idea of the muses. Milton's commitment to meditative insight here, and to the muses and divine inspiration throughout his poetic production, can too readily be misread as part of the traditional baggage of ancient poetry, unthought, conventional. It is a tradition, certainly, but it is a tradition consciously thought through and chosen, and in firm opposition to official authority and convention.18 The recurrence of 'L' Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' of the bardic, the dramatic, the epic, the folk tale, the folk song, and high anthem identifies the theme of these twin poems as the poetic itself, the 'poetic' standing as shorthand for the range of oral and literary arts. The contrasting moods are the contrasting moods of inspiration, the sources of creativity — bubbling-over creative joy, simmering, brooding, creative melancholy. What is rehearsed is a list of possible topics for poetic treatment. Milton's manuscript lists of possible subjects for verse have survived. These two poems are no less lists, resumes of potential themes, catalogues of possibility. But characteristically this centralizing of the concern of poetry is outward reaching: the themes of ^33 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING poetry are the themes of life. The catalogue of subjects is in itself an inventory of existence. The scenes of 'Merry England' - and the poems have become touchstones of the literary treatment of the idyllically English - are scenes for poetry, and the poetic, as always with Milton, leads into the political. The celebration of human activity, honest labour, is as present as the celebration of the possible poetic. This is a portrait of English rural activity that recognizes people at work - shepherd, ploughman, milkmaid, mower. 19 It is the pastoral of productive labour, not of literary evasion. But the absent song of the nightingale should alert us to significant absences. In this catalogue of poetic themes, certain themes are excluded. This rural England contains no maypoles, morris dancing, church wakes, there is none of the Stuart programme of social control that was enshrined in the Book of Sports.20 There are no feasts, markets, wassails, skimmingtons, bear-baitings, mince pies, or plum porridge. Yet in no way is it bleakly, dourly 'puritan' in that joyless, repressive connotation of the term. There is song, dance, music, theatre, poetry, leisure. 'Lycidas' makes its political statement by the denunciation of the corrupted clergy. 'L'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' make their political statements by presenting a beautiful and idyllic rural life in which the Stuart social controls are splendidly absent. It is a vision of freedom in that regard. 'Sweet Liberty' is invoked in 'L'Allegro' alongside 'Mirth' (lines 35-7). The absent nightingale is similarly significant. We are not offered songs of tragic love, sado-masochistic fables from Marie de France, courtly amours, adventures, adulteries, and retributions. The pastoral presented is not an eroticized pastoral. The milkmaids are not represented in sexual dalliance. The dawn is not an occasion for the aubade of the lovers' parting. The whole tradition of erotic poetry, so recently reasserted for Milton's contemporaries by the publication of John Donne's Poems (1633) is absent here. It is a significant absence, and it is reintroduced as an absence again when the poet considers other poetic possibilities in 'Lycidas': Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? (lines 64—9) There is a typical Miltonic ambiguity or duality here. Writing serious poetry is put up as an opposition to engaging in sexual adventures. But there is also another opposition. 'To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair' suggests, as well as adventures, the practice of the 2-34 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS literary erotic. The complexities and subtleties of verse production, the games playing of shaded meaning to be decoded, the ambiguities and innuendoes to be disentangled are all implied here. The temptation is not only the simple temptation of lived sexuality, but the intertwined temptation of writing erotic poetry, in contrast with 'the homely slighted Shepherd's trade' which can be read as a metaphor for unpornographic pastoral and religious poetry. The rejection of eroticized pastoral, the rejection of the celebration of sexual adventure in verse is consistent in the practice of this first volume of Milton's poems; and it is spelled out in the contemptuous dismissal of the 'serenate, which the starv'd lover sings / To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain' in Paradise Lost (4.769—70). Rejecting the erotic, Milton moves directly to the traditional motivation for poetry, Fame: Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life. (lines 70—6) But the fame topos is given a striking shift. Instead of the poet conferring fame on the subject — as in Sonnet 7 - here fame becomes the poet's motivation for writing the poem. It is presented as an 'infirmity', the disabling egotistic self-preoccupation of the poet, concerned with the reader's response to the poem and not with the proper subject and motivation. Self-referentialism is applied here in a positive way, as self-inquisition. The poet's concern with writing a poem to secure fame for the poet is sardonically interrogated. Is this the proper motive? Is this a good motive? The fate of the poet Lycidas cut short in youth provokes the poet to question the value of writing for fame: what is the point when you won't be around to revel in it? The answer is rapidly presented: 'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumor lies, But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed.' (lines 78—84) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING Poetry is written for divine judgement. The apocalyptic note recurrent throughout 'Lycidas' is here brought into relationship with the recurrent concern with poetry. The final judgement will be applied to everyone. Just as corrupt rulers and corrupt clergy will be on trial when the divine 'pronounces lastly' (line 83), so will corrupt poets. The proper subject of poetry is a subject that will be acceptable to the divine. That is why the problem of the subject of poetry is so important, why poetry is ceaselessly interrogated in Milton's poetry. It is of a piece with the concern of Sonnet 7 and of that later great sonnet 'On his Blindness'; correct self-analysis is not the simple egotistical preoccupation with achieving fame, but with interrogating life and poetry in the expectation of judgement in 'my great task Master's eye' (Sonnet 7, line 14). Poetic possibility is a dominant concern of 'Lycidas', appropriately enough since the subject of the elegy, Edward King, had written poetry: 21 Who would not sing for Lycidas} he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. (lines 10—11) The image of Orpheus is appropriately present yet again: What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her enchanting son Whom Universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His goary visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? (lines 58-63) Orpheus is the touchstone reference for the poet, and also of the poet's fate.22 This is what happens to true poets. True poetry has the power of prophecy, both telling the future and denouncing the corruptions of the present, and it is not welcome. Milton was lucky not to share a comparable fate at the Restoration: probably only his blindness saved him from having his own severed head displayed on a pike. 'Lycidas' is another of the occasional poems. But the poet-prophet properly seizes the occasion to transcend the occasion. The political denunciation delivered has its literary precedents of course — notably Dante in the Paradise* (29.106—7). But how many poets in English had availed themselves of the tradition? To follow this tradition is to be at the same time untraditional. The poem proceeds by a series of tonal contrasts and clashes. 'Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string' (line 17). With the denunciation Milton reaches out for the extreme note, for an excess of force and content that 'shrunk' the streams of Alpheus. In marked contrast to the speech of 'the 236 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS pilot of the Galilean lake' (line 109) is the immediately preceding speech of Camus: '"Ah! Who hath reft" (quoth he) "my dearest pledge?"' (line 107). It is a nice dismissal of the useless university, unable to speak out, unable to say anything much at all. The total inadequacy of Camus' response, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually represents its larger inadequacy in the society: its moral, intellectual and political bankruptcy. In this context of the poetic, Cambridge is clearly no model or inspirational source for the literary arts when all it can offer is this. 23 'Lycidas' is a deeply moving poem, yet not without its sardonic wit. Camus' verbal inadequacy is one example. The catalogue of flowers is another: Bring the rathe Primsore that forsaken dies, The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jessamine, The white Pink, and the Pansy freakt with jet, The glowing Violet, The Musk-rose, and the well-attir'd Woodbine, With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, (lines 142—7) It is another commemoration of the English countryside, adapted from the 'Sicilian muse'. But it is there not as an inert repetition of a tradition, but as a tragically ironic paradox. Lycidas' body is lost at sea so there is no 'Laureate Hearse where Lycid lies' (line 151) to strew. It is 'false surmise'. Milton has created literary substance from absence. The catalogue of flowers, the procession of mourners, the complaint about the failure of divine protection ('Where were ye Nymphs', line 50), the despair at the futility of the struggles of existence ('Alas! What boots it with uncessant care', line 64) are all part of the pastoral elegy whose tradition Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion had established. Milton knows his authorities. 24 But as with his prose polemics, he cites authority yet sets little store by it. 25 These may be the traditional subjects of poetry as practised by the traditional poetic authorities, but in the end the authorities are irrelevant, the tradition is unimportant, the old order has been superseded: Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more, For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor, So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head. (lines 165—9) Christ's nativity has made the classical tradition obsolete. The promise of resurrection has turned the pastoral elegy into elegant but irrelevant fiction. The proper subject of poetry has changed. The final section of the poem draws on the new imagery and the new authority of Christianity: ^37 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING So Lycidas, sunk low, but mounted high Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves. (lines 172-3) Commentators have remarked on the tension of classical and Christian in the poem, yet it is less a tension than a supersession.26 Just as the opening poem in the first collection has the old classical divinities leaving the scene movingly, poetically so, but leaving nonetheless - so here the classical tradition is gradually permeated by and replaced by the Christian. The 'Fountain Arethuse' (line 85), inspiration of the classical, is transcended by the mention of 'that strain I heard was of a higher mood' (line 87). Arethuse goes underground and rises again after 'the Pilot of the Galilean Lake' speaks: 'Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past / That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse' (lines 132-3). The river Alpheus going underground and arising again as the fountain Arethuse is a prefiguration of the resurrection, however. The classical muses are invoked only to be outclassed by the Christian. The Sicilian muse brings in the beautiful catalogue of flowers but it is a literary token, a fantasy, since there is not a body to strew. That is no problem for the Christian muse. The missing body recalls the empty tomb of Christ's resurrection. 'Weep no more, woeful Shepherds' (line 165). The classical muse remains stuck in despair: the Christian muse continues with triumph. Indeed, we can see this interchange of classical and Christian poetics as a dialogue or debate between the two traditions, in which the Christian inexorably triumphs. The received image of Milton, and it is not an incorrect one, is of a strong personality. Yet this first volume of poems is strangely impersonal.27 It is not easy to construct a figure of Milton from it — unlike the figure of Donne or of Herbert that we can construct from their volumes of the 1630s. That idea of Tillyard's that in writing 'Lycidas' Milton was writing about himself is a clever idea but not borne out by a reading of the poem.28 The title of John Crowe Ransom's essay, 'A Poem Nearly Anonymous', captures the experience more closely.29 There is a marked absence of the promotion of the personal in these poems. There is a strong concern with poetry, certainly, but not with the individual poet. The poet is the medium transmitting the inspiration of the muses, of the heavenly spirit, not an egoflaunting author. But poetry itself is the continual theme. Milton is wrestling with those poetic preoccupations that have been seen as characteristically postmodern, though have surely always been there: poetry created from absence, like 'On Time', which laments the lack of achievement, the lack of substance, and thus creates a poetic substance and achievement; poetry from incompletion and failure, like 'The Passion' where the very inability to replicate or para238 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS phrase Christ's passion is the poem's paradoxical achievement (to have produced a 'successful' poem on the passion would surely have been to have failed, to have been entrapped by hubris and delusion and Satanic pride); and poetry rehearsing the themes of poetry, poetry about the possibilities of poetry, like 'L'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso', and about the traditions of poetry, like 'Lycidas'. Yet all these preoccupations with the problems and sources and practice of poetry are preoccupations that move outward. Formalist theories are never entertained. The poet has to find the proper subjects and to be open to the inspiration of the heavenly muse to succeed. NOTES 1 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) is the standard political biography. 2 Louis Martz offers the classic apolitical reading in 'The Rising Poet, 1645', in The Lyric and Dramatic Milton, ed. Joseph H. Summers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 3-33. 3 Political readings include Thomas N. Corns, 'Milton's Quest for Respectability', Modern Language Review JJ (1982): 769—79; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 235—85; and Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 7—27. 4 Arthur Barker, 'The Pattern of Milton's "Nativity Ode"', University of Toronto Quarterly 10 (1940), repr. in Milton: Modern Judgements, ed. Alan Rudrum (London: Macmillan, 1968) p. 54. 5 All quotations from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1985). 6 I am dealing here only with the English poems, but this concept is explicit in 'Ad Patrem', lines 50—5: 'And now, to sum it all up, what pleasure is there in the inane modulation of the voice without words and meaning and rhythmic eloquence? Such music is good enough for the forest choirs, but not for Orpheus, who by his song — not by his cithara — restrained rivers and gave ears to the oaks, and by his singing stirred the ghosts of the dead to tears. That fame he owes to his song.' 7 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 58. 8 The occasional nature of these poems has been remarked by, amongst others, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton's Mind (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 119; Edward W. Tayler, Milton's Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), p. 18; E. A. J. Honigman, Milton's Sonnets (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 31. 9 See William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974); a n d M. V. Rama Sarma, Milton and the Prophetic Strain (New Delhi: Sterling, 1991). 10 It might arguably be claimed both sections are of eight stanzas each. For numerological readings of the poems, see Maren-Sofie Rostvig, 'Elaborate Song: Con239 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WILDING 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 ceptual Structure in Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity'" and H. Neville Davies, 'Laid Artfully Together: Stanzaic Design in Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"' in Maren-Sofie Rostvig (ed.), Fair Forms (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1975), pp. 54-84, 85-118. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 288. David Shelley Berkeley, Inwrought with Figures Dim: A Reading of Milton s 'Lycidas' (The Hague: Mouton, 1984), pp. 33-4. David Daiches, Milton (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1957). Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 29. John Milton, p. 67. 'The singing of Orpheus has both purpose and consequence', as Stanley Fish observes,'What It's Like to Read UAllegro and // Penseroso\ Milton Studies 7 (i975): 93See Norman B. Council, 'L3Allegro, II Penseroso, and "The Cycle of Universal Knowledge", Milton Studies 9 (1976): 203—19. See Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton, pp. 70—82. See Wilding, Dragons Teeth, pp. 23-7. A contrary view is expressed in Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy, Poems of Mr John Milton: The 1645 Edition with Essays in Analysis (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1951), p. 140. Milton's opposition to the Book of Sports is expressed in his Of Reformation in England (1641), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, vol. 1 (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1953), p. 589. See Daiches, Milton, pp. 76-92; Belsey, John Milton, p. 28. 'The Orpheus myth is a displaced return of the repressed, a repetition of the castration complex that the shepherd himself is subjected to.' 'The poem is, finally, a repetition in toto of the castration complex, what amounts to an obsessive poem.' Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 114, 105. However, David Shelley Berkeley presents 'Cambridge University as a Type of the Heavenly Paradise' in chapter 3 of Inwrought With Figures Dim, pp.85—112. 24 See James H. Hanford, 'The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas', PMLA 25 (1910): 403—27; repr. in Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides, new and rev. edn (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), PP. 31-59. 25 See Ernest Sirluck (ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 164—5. 26 See A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, Volume Two, The Minor English Poems, ed. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) for examples. 27 Cf. Northrop Frye, 'Literature as Context: Milton's Lycidas', Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. W. P. Friederich, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 23 (1959); repr. in Patrides (ed.), Milton's Lycidas p. 272. 28 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 80. 240 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 JOHN MILTON: THE EARLY WORKS 29 John Crowe Ransom, 'A Poem Nearly Anonymous', American Review 4 (1933), repr. in Patrides (ed.), Milton s Lycidas, pp. 69-85. See also Stanley E. Fish, 'Lyicdas: A Poem Finally Anonymous,' Glyph 8 (1981) repr. in Patrides (ed.), Milton's Lycidas, pp. 319—45. FURTHER READING Bateson, F. W., English Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London: Longman, 1950) Belsey, Catherine, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) Brooks, Cleanth and John Edward Hardy, Poems of Mr John Milton: The 1645 Edition With Essays in Analysis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951) Burnett, Archie, Milton s Style: The Shorter Poems, 'Paradise Lost/ and Samson Agonistes (London: Longman, 1981) Corns, Thomas N., Milton's Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) Davis, H. Neville, 'Milton and the Art of Cranking', Milton Quarterly 23.1 (1989): Fish, Stanley E., 'What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and II Penseroso', Milton Studies 7 (i97'5)"- 77-99 Fowler, Alastair, Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Hill, Christopher, Milton and The English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) Hunt, Clay, Lycidas and the Italian Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) Leishman, J. B., Milton's Minor Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1969) Leonard, John,' "Trembling Ears": the Historical Moment of Lycidas", Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1991): 59—81 Milner, Andrew, John Milton and the English Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981) Norbrook, David, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) Parker, William Riley, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) Patrides, C. A., (ed.), Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, new and rev. edn (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983) Richmond, Hugh, The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) Shawcross, J. T. (ed.), Milton: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Milton 1732—1801: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) Summers, Joseph H. (ed.), The Lyric and Dramatic Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) Wilding, Michael, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Wittreich, Joseph A., Jr, Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1979) 241 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sydney Library, on 03 Apr 2020 at 23:09:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411475.011 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006