William Empson: The Milton Controversy

Abstract

A leading article in the TLS on September 5, 19581 warmly endorsed the critical assessment by Rosemond Tuve, as reported in her talk published in a recent issue of The Listener (August 28), of the ways in which critics of Milton over the last 150 years have approached his imagery. For example, it said, the Victorians over-emphasized the merely descriptive function of Milton's images; more recently, the fashion has been to harp upon their archetypal or “mythical” significance. But the true way to appreciate the dynamic of Milton's images is to understand them in the intellectual setting of his age: “We may not be able to accept them literally as theological truth, but we ought to be able to enter into them as a living pattern of thoughts about liberty and authority, dignity and obedience, order and impulse…” F. R. Leavis—the “arch-anti-Miltonist,” as he wryly reckoned himself to be labeled (“malign influence being the criterion”)—objected2 to such a thoroughgoing endorsement of Rosemond Tuve's views, with all their shallow misrepresentation of recent critical positions. “Miss Tuve clearly implies that it was characteristic of the notorious adverse critics of Milton to refuse to take Milton's theological scheme seriously; ‘taking seriously’ is defined by her references to Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis… Mr John Peter, writing in Scrutiny a half-dozen years ago (October 1952)…examined at length the habitual way in which the Miltonists—and the Miltonists command the academic world—virtually ignore the case that has been made against Milton (he refers especially to A. J. A. Waldock and myself), even while they make a showing of discussing it. There prevails in the academic world, he observed (with illustrations), a tacit agreement either to ignore it altogether or to pretend that it is disposed of…”