Milton's Sacral PoeticsPoetics of the Holy: A Reading of Paradise Lost. Michael Lieb

Abstract

Michael Lieb's book investigates Milton's against background of modern anthropological theory, classical and Hebraic thought, and concepts of sacred held by poet's near contemporaries. Milton's epic, he suggests, most priestly of poems, product of true hierophant, a testament to all holy represents. The holy shaped Milton's and defined his vision as significantly as any other experience found expression in his writings, and accordingly, future considerations of Milton's works must take into account holy as phenomenon of crucial importance to his outlook. His full range of poetics simply cannot be understood unless numinous plays part. Nor, for matter, can his stance as polemist be sufficiently appreciated if it is divorced from traditions of holy he embraced (p. 328). Citing Octavio Paz's arguments the sacred is feeling from which sublime and poetic stem and as revelation the poetic and religious 'have common origin' grounded in 'our constitutive otherness, ' Lieb attempts to place Milton precisely in tradition of poet as discloser of 'the other'. . (p. xviii). In developing this argument, Lieb emphasizes priority of revelatory experience over rationalism and sectarian dogma. The poetics that constitutes this tradition [of poet as discloser of 'the other'] runs counter to parochializing tendencies of all who would 'tame' Milton by subjecting him to tyranny of paradigm has dominated Milton criticism over years and has domesticated him with such labels of convenience as 'humanist,' 'puritan,' and 'rationalist.' In this way Milton's original poetic vision [has been] relegated to demands of dogmatic (p. xviii). Against such secularizing and demythologizing points of view, Lieb endeavors to demonstrate the extent to which Milton's religiosity not only aligns him with an outlook is fundamentally sacral but causes him to become, in Paz's terms, poet of'the other' par excellence (p. xix). Just as William Kerrigan and Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., have estab-