No Middle Flight

Abstract

1HE FORTUNATE COLLABORATION of literary-historical scholarship 1 with literary criticism, so often wished for, so seldom achieved, is nowhere more plainly to be seen at present than in Milton studies. One can return to the reading of Paradise Lost with a certain youthful excitement and sense of novelty, because it seems clear that the critical appraisal of that poem is a central literary experience, relevant to our theories of poetry in general, to our response to modern poetry, and to our understanding of history. To read the twenty or thirty recent books on Milton as we reread the poem is to sense that some of the best minds of our age are engaged in the study of Milton, and that if we wish to consider what are the vital and energetic forces at work in modern criticism, here is an arena where we can see the display. Far from smothering the subject, the Milton scholarship and criticism of the last quarter century have successfully directed our attention back to the poetry itself, and this is indeed a virtue. Moreover, the concerns of the recent scholars and critics of Milton have not been narrow; to approach Paradise Lost these days is to bring to bear the principal methods and techniques of both scholarship and criticism. Perhaps the chief service which modern scholarship has performed for Paradise Lost is to show that it is a hexaemeral poem; to demonstrate how deeply it is embedded in a tradition, to illustrate how respectable, intellectually, are the ideas to which the poem is a monument. We have learned how to approach the thought of a seventeenth-century writer seriously, with a realization that a proper appraisal requires knowledge of contemporary issues, insight into the importance of the argument about each of them, and infinite patience to trace the logic, the allusions, the chronology of his thought. Seen in the proper historical perspective, Milton's poem becomes a part of a large body of learned discussion of the meaning and significance of the Creation myth. Arnold Williams' book, The