Teaching Milton's Early Poetry

Abstract

TEACHING MILTON'S POETRY raises difficult problems. More than the work of most literary figures, Milton's poetry demands a familiarity with its literary, cultural, and historical milieu. A knowledge of classical mythology, Christian theology, Puritan controversy, and seventeenth-century history is often central to an understanding of Milton's work, and, as every teacher of Milton knows, today's students rarely come to a Milton course with such background. Another teaching problem results from Milton's reputation. Not only do most students consider Milton a difficult and a remote poet, but they also think of him as a Puritan. For them, all too often to be a Puritan is to be a religious fanatic, a kill-joy, or, worst of all, a sexual prude. More serious than either of these problems is that of aesthetic taste. Milton is a master of the long poem; we live in an era that values short poetic forms and fiction. Milton is a lover of ornamentation; we live in an era that favors directness in style. Milton is a writer of grandiloquent poetry (my students pejoratively refer to it as flowery); we live in an era that prefers simplicity and understatement. Milton is a skilled user of the remote, the impersonal, the public voice; we live in an era that values the psychological, the personal, the private voice. And Milton is an experimenter in genres that are no longer viable today-the descriptio, the classical pastoral, the court masque. The least accessible of all of Milton's poetry, it seems to me, is the early poetry, for whereas Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes have narratives, psychological concerns, and thematic issues which interest the contemporary student, the earlier poems seem more remote, more ornate, and less obviously relevant to students today. The first time I taught a course in Milton, in the fall of 1975, I became painfully aware of these problems and how they interfered with the students' enjoyment and understanding of Milton's work, especially the early poems. In that course, I took a fairly standard major author approach to Milton's art, an approach patterned after my own undergraduate Milton course. I began by delivering introductory lectures on Milton's life and on seventeenth-century historical and philosophical background. I then assigned the early poems in their chronological order of composition, beginning with On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, and gave traditional close readings of these short works before moving on to Paradise Lost. The results of this thorough, well-researched, tightly-organized approach were poor at best. Although the better students were interested, involved, and learning, the majority of