Milton and the Decline of Epic in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

O F THE TRADITIONAL English poetic genres in which Milton excelled, at least three-the epic, the pastoral elegy, and the sonnet-go into serious if not terminal decline during the eighteenth century. It is tempting to see a causal relationship here. Although no critic, to my knowledge, has addressed the matter directly, general suggestions about Milton's influence for good or ill and the redirection of the impulse into mock-heroic forms or into the novel, for example, are common enough. The purpose of the present paper is to reconsider the ideas, implicit in these and other suggestions, of Milton's impact on eighteenth-century English epic writers, and in particular to test theoretical pronouncements against the careful observations of the literary historian. My broadest conclusion is a skeptical one: it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to explain the relationship between the poems that Milton wrote and the poems that eighteenth-century writers did not write. But I think we can go some way toward describing the relationship, and can see that it is a complex one, involving a good deal more than the achievement of a single great poet. There are at least three theoretical ways to account for the relationship between Paradise Lost and the absence of great epic in the eighteenth century. One finds the answer in Milton's own intimidating achievement; the second in the character of the age; the third in the nature of the epic genre itself. The first theory is associated with the recent work of Harold Bloom and Walter Jackson Bate. It should be emphasized at the outset, however, that neither Bloom nor Bate in fact states that Milton intimidated the poets of the eighteenth century. Bloom's concern is largely with Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and Bate has surprisingly little to say about Milton, though he says a good deal about the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, implicit in The Anxiety of Influence and The Burden of the Past are the notions that Milton's great epic so awed the writers of the following century that they instinctively shied away from emulating him, or that Milton's accomplishment seemed so definitive that there seemed to be nothing left for a would-be epic poet to do. Milton deterred the great or