Milton's Blindness: The Conscious and Unconscious Patterns of Autobiograph

Abstract

It is characteristic of Milton's integrating poetic method that the autobiographical material in Paradise Lost should be firmly associated with the development of his theme and narrative, as well as delicately suited to the demands of his genre. Whether one is reading an isolated line or an extensive passage, an aside on Restoration depravity or a more comprehensive placement of the poet in the frame of his time, one finds the autobiographical elements, in varying degrees of explicitness, appropriately honed to the needs of the poem. To focus on the most familiar and perhaps greatest example of the technique, the section of Book III dealing with his blindness and his function as a blind poet' is openly at the service of the light imagery in the poem, and links together such concepts as the poetic journey and the controlling role of the poet. It touches as well on the supremacy of God and his spirituality over things of the physical plane, no matter how good those sights may be in themselves. But we should give attention, I suggest, to the less apparent yet vital function that this autobiographical material has within the complex literary and psychological pressures of the epic: the ebb and flow of personal revelation as they serve to mirror larger aesthetic and intellectual purposes in the poem; the manipulation of the figure of self so that that process becomes suggestive of answering patterns in the poet's theme; and always the selection of verbal detail brought to bear on these phenomena in the course of their creation. By seeing these processes, too, as they reveal themselves in the vital context of the poet's inner drives, we may perhaps come to understand more of the varied relationships that exist between Milton's utterances about his own life and the full context of their coming into being. It is, I think, an interaction of mutual needs, with Milton's requirements both as poet and as an emotionally wounded, sensitive man in perfect symbiotic union. And if the famous blindness passage in Book III provides easy, commonplace realization of Milton's subordination of self to the demands of his epic, it may, by very virtue of its closeness to us, also help to give an understanding