Milton's Works Research Articles

The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton's Works. Milton, Michael Lieb

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton's Works. Milton, Michael LiebStella P. RevardStella P. Revard Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 89, Number 3Feb., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391982 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The sinews of Ulysses: form and convention in Milton's works

The sinews of Ulysses: form and convention in Milton's works

Coleridge, the French Revolution, and 'The Ancient Mariner': Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation

S. T. Coleridge's 'The Rime of Ancient Mariner' was written against the background of the collapse of the poet's hopes for the improvement of mankind by political action, the ultimate failure of the French Revolution to distinguish itself from its oppressive Bourbon predecessors. The contribution of Coleridge's political beliefs to this poem has never been fully appreciated. Certainly 'The Ancient Mariner' has none of the political allusions which stud the contemporaneous 'France: an Ode' or 'Fears in Solitude' and this has led most critics to concur with E. M. W. Tillyard that the poem exhibits 'a total lack of politics'.' Yet given the circumstances which gave rise to 'The Ancient Mariner', this very absence of political content is itself political. As Carl Woodring puts it, if Coleridge's supernatural poems are poems of escape, 'politics form a large part of what they escaped from'.2 The importance of the French Revolution to 'The Ancient Mariner' can be seen in Coleridge's obsession with that other poet and disillusioned supporter of revolution, John Milton. During 1795-96 he fills the Gutch memorandum notebook with allusions and references to Toland's edition of Milton's prose works of 1698.3 Coleridge had Milton's career very much in mind when writing 'The Ancient Mariner'. Like himself, the poet of Paradise Lost had witnessed the complete wreck of his own hopes for a regenerated nation. In March 1819 Coleridge delivered a lecture on Milton and Paradise Lost which tells us a great deal about his own state of mind. Milton was: '. as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal'.4 Although ultimately Coleridge hoped that his own vengeance would be

ABSTRACTS

Sheila T. Cavanagh. “Battles of the Mind and Body: Rational and Sensual Seduction in Spenser and Milton.”Stephen M. Fallen. “Milton's Augustinian Allegory.”Albert C. Labriola. “‘God Speaks’: Milton's Dialogue in Heaven and the Tradition of Divine Deliberation”Roger Lejosne. “John Milton et Les Voies de Dieu.”John Shawcross. “Interferences of the Self: Mother Fixation and Milton's Life and Work.”Sara Thorne‐Thomsen. “Epic Continuity: the Lyric Epithalamia in The Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost.”John C. Ulreich, Jr. “Making Dreams Truth, and Fables Histories: Spenser and Milton on the Nature of Fiction.”

Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy

Few writers have achieved the synthesis of art and idea that was attained by John Milton in Paradise Lost. In that work the poet addressed one of the most important questions in philosophy and religion: How could God, if he is omnipotent and wholly good, have made a world in which there is so much evil? In this book Professor Danielson examines Paradise Lost, focusing on Milton's treatment of creation, chaos, predestination, free will, God's foreknowledge, the Fall of Man and the nature of human existence before the Fall. The author thereby not only lays a systematic foundation for understanding Milton's defence of the creator's justice and goodness but also explores how the literary character of that defence gives it a unique human vitality, dramatic consistency and logical coherence. Milton's Good God is an interdisciplinary study, which will lead the student of literature to a deeper appreciation of Paradise Lost while drawing the student of ideas to a fuller awareness of the importance of Milton's work for the fields of philosophy, theology and intellectual history.

REVIEWS

Treip on Raphael and MiltonMilton's Work for the English AristocracyMilton and Ovid

An Appreciation of Milton's Piano Music

Y LEARNING MANY of Milton's piano works, performing them, and then reworking them several months (or years) later to play again, I have experienced that Milton's pieces, like all works destined to become classic, lead a life of their own-collectively, as a wonderfully unique body of works by the same composer; and individually, for each work creates its own expressive realm. The first work of Milton's that I learned was Three Compositionsfor Piano (1947), and that was in 1977. How hard I remember working on the treacherous first piece of this group, striving for fluid, dynamic clarity at those demonic tempi! The second piece I learned to consider as a kaleidescope of harmonies, and the third as a playful scherzando. It's a long jump from Three Compsitions to Reflections (1974) for piano and synthesized tape, but that was the next piece of Milton's I learned-to perform in the 1981 Musica Nova Festival (Glasgow). With Reflctions, I began a process

Paradise Lost and the Youthful Reader

Paradise Lost and the Youthful Reader Joan F. Gilliland (bio) Paradise Lost is not usually considered a children's book today; indeed it often poses problems for modern college students—if they read it at all. And though there is much talk of children and offspring in the poem, no child actually appears as a character. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in fact not many years after the first publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, it was being recommended to young people, edited for them, and, most important, read by them. Young people's editions proliferated in both England and America, and a school text of Paradise Lost was even published in Calcutta in 1844. Not only were editions prepared for the young, but excerpts were included in anthologies, and the poem was cited in grammar and rhetoric texts. The reasons for this widespread desire to introduce children to Paradise Lost were both religious and aesthetic. As William Sloane reports, in 1710 Joseph Downing included Milton in The Young Christian's Library, a reading list that suggested devotional and didactic reading and just one other poet, George Herbert. Edmund Burke and Richard Baron both recommended Milton to young people, Baron saying, "MILTON in particular ought to be read and studied by all our young Gentlemen as an Oracle" (Havens, p. 27). In America, Benjamin Franklin included Milton among "the best English authors" to be studied in the Sixth class at the Philadelphia Academy (Sensabaugh, p. 36). Several eighteenth-century editions of Milton's work were intended for young people, among them a "Collection of Poems from our most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the Use of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, at Schools" (1717), which "included eighteen selections from the epic," and The Beauties of Milton, Thomson, and Young (1783), for "the rising youth of both sexes" (Havens, p. 25, 26). And Dr. Dodd's Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (1761) appealed "especially to Parents, and those who have the Care of Youth; if they are desirous that their Children and Trusts should be acquainted with the Graces of the British Homer . . . . The fair Sex in particular will receive great Advantages from it" (Havens, p. 25). School editions of Milton's poetry, and specifically Paradise Lost, continued to be published in the nineteenth century. Stevens' Reference Guide to Milton lists at least twelve nineteenth-century editions of Paradise Lost or selected books of Paradise Lost that are explicitly marked as school texts. Published in [End Page 26] England, America, and India, they bear such labels as "For the Use of Schools," "Especially Adapted for Elementary Schools," and "The National School Series." Further, many other editions not so plainly earmarked would clearly have been appropriate for use in schools. As James Buchanan said in 1773 of an edition of the First Six Books of Paradise Lost, rendered into Grammatical Construction, as it exhibits a view of every thing great in the whole circle of Being, it would (besides greatly improving them [schoolboys] in their own language) wonderfully open the capacity, improve the judgment, elevate the ideas, refine the imagination, and, finally, infuse a just and noble relish for all that is beautiful and great in the Aeneid and Iliad. (Havens, p. 27) The implication is that a study of Paradise Lost in English would then lead naturally to the classical epics which preceded it. Rendering Paradise Lost into grammatical construction seems to have been a favorite use for the poem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. George F. Sensabaugh says that by the Revolutionary period popular textbooks in America "presented Milton as an authority on the correct and effective use of the English language," thus bringing his work "before a large captive audience" (p. 99). Sensabaugh mentions Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in Philadelphia in 1775, which quotes Milton, and Ralph Harrison's Rudiments of English Grammar (1777; Wilmington, 1788), which draws on Paradise Lost to illustrate the ways poetry and prose differ. And Raymond Dexter Havens comments in a footnote to his discussion of Milton's popularity that "Many Americans now [1922] living learned grammar by parsing Paradise Lost" (p. 26...

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

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-

The Date of Milton's "Artis Logicae" and the Development of the Idea of Definition in Milton's Works

The Date of Milton's "Artis Logicae" and the Development of the Idea of Definition in Milton's Works

Milton's Urania and Her Romantic Descendants

When Milton in Paradise Lost invokes Urania he calls upon the 'meaning' rather than the 'Name' (VII, 5).' While the 'Name' is pagan, grounded in the Greek mythology that includes Olympus, the nine Muses, and Pegasus, the 'meaning' is Christian, which is to say before the foundation of the world or, in the wording of Milton's text, 'before the Hills appeerd, or Fountain flow'd' (VII, 8). Milton's distinction between the pagan and Christian Urania calls attention to the fact not only that he is writing a Christian epic but, more important, that it is a work 'unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime' (I, 16). In the laborious working out of his own heretical Christian position, the cornerstone of which is the doctrine of Christian liberty, Milton believed he had gained direct access to the will of the Father through the agency of the mind of Christ present to him in the operations of his own regenerate reason. By virtue of that access he could write not merely as a poet but as a prophet. The 'Heav'nly Muse' (I, 6) who inspired his song was the Muse who inspired Moses to write the first five books of the Old Testament. Indeed, numbering himself among 'the Lord's people' whose God preferred 'before all Temples th' upright heart and pure' (I, 18), Milton, as a result of his long and arduous work of reformation, came to the composition of Paradise Lost a 'more considerate [builder], more wise in spiritual architecture' (Areopagitica, p 749). Though the outer work of 'great reformation' (p 749) had apparently failed, though he had 'fall'n on evil dayes' and 'evil tongues' and was 'with dangers compast round, I And solitude' (VII, 25-8), the inner work had gone forward. If the 'fit audience' of the Lord's people had been reduced to the 'few' (VII, 31) capable of receiving his radical work, both he and audience were nevertheless the fulfilment of Moses' 'memorable and glorious wish' that 'all the Lord's people ... become prophets' (p 749). Thus, if Moses joins with Milton in lamenting the Restoration, he yet 'may sit in heaven rejoicing to see' (p 749) Milton's 'Heav'nly Muse' dictating to him his 'unpremeditated Verse' (IX, 23). Paradise Lost is Milton's completed work of reformation; his invocation to the Muse celebrates the Christian liberty that confers prophethood upon the Lord's people. The inspired company of Christian poet and chosen readers is Milton's challenging answer to the Restoration.

Teaching Milton's Early Poetry

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

The Voice of the Destroyer in Adam's Diatribes

Out of depths of his ruin, after Fall and before process of regeneration has begun, Milton's Adam utters three complaints which demonstrate effects of Fall on a mind once... full of Peace, now tost and turbulent: / For Understanding rul'd (9. 1125-27).' In first he rebukes Eve, not for disobeying God but for parting from his own side. In second he implies that God designed Eve to tempt him. In third he denounces Eve as crooked by Nature and marriage as a source of inescapable woe. These are salient speeches, for they lay bare ruins to be repaired, and they do so by denying fundamental pattern of experience which Milton represents in unfallen and in regenerate life: continual reciprocity of divine providence and human responsibility. Nevertheless, distinguished critics have treated these diatribes as if they expressed Milton's personal opinion. Samuel Johnson states that Milton had something like a Turkish contempt for females; James Holly Hanford that the poet bears a grudge against woman as perverse occasion of man's entanglement; E. M. W. Tillyard that Adam's worst invective of course Milton's own voice . . . uttering his ancient grievance; and Harris Fletcher that it is one of most vividly personal utterances in all of Milton's works.2 Innumerable others have agreed with fallen Adam's distorted view of unfallen Eve and allowed it to color their readings of scenes before Fall. These interpretations obscure both symptoms of original sin revealed in Adam's invective and nature of original righteousness represented in marriage of Adam and Eve.

God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits

Between the interpretation in Milton's prose works of the monarchy of Charles I and the portrayal in Paradise Lost of the tyranny of Satan there exists an extensive and complex consistency based on the concept of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that informs the character and world view of Satan as well as of King Charles. In his effort to counteract the Eikon Basilike's picture of Charles as a Christlike martyr-king, Milton drew in Eikonoklastes—albeit in fragmentary form—his own essentially fictional characterization of Charles as a tyrant. This analysis, continued in the Defences, studies Charles's personal heroism, political behavior, delusions about himself, his followers, and his cause and is extensively paralleled in the depiction of Satan. These prose works thus serve as a valuable literary gloss on Paradise Lost—on certain details of imagery and characterization and on Milton's conception of true liberty and revolution.

Three Monographs on Milton: An AssessmentWedges and Wings: The Patterning of "Paradise Regained". Burton Jasper WeberThe Politics of Milton's Prose Style. Keith W. StavelyThe Christian Revolutionary: John Milton. Hugh M. Richmond

Judging by three monographs under consideration,' Milton industry, like Shakespeare industry, shows no sign of waning; and, if these studies are any indication of what scholarship on Milton has in store for its readers, then brief excursus will continue to dominate scholarly scene. Because of their ever-increasing number, such studies might elicit reviewer's oft-heard cry for moratorium, but I feel that this is cry with which it is perhaps too easy to sympathize. Given temptation to become exasperated at yearly proliferation of monographs on Milton, best antidote is Milton's own statement in Areopagitica: little generous prudence, little forbearance of one another, and som grain of charity might win all these diligences to joyn, and unite into one generall and brotherly search after Truth.2 With that statement in mind, I shall now attempt to determine how well monographs at hand perform noble task of searching after Truth (Miltonic or otherwise). As Burton Jasper Weber indicates in his preface to Wedges and Wings, his task is one of attempting to determine way in which Paradise Regained is organized and, as result of that determination, what concepts are implied by the arrangement of materials (p. xi). The approach is certainly valid; in fact, organization of Paradise Regained has become pretty much cause celbre among critics, as fine studies of Elizabeth M. Pope, Arnold Stein, and especially Barbara Lewalski will attest.3 Perhaps more than any of Milton's other work, Paradise Regained invites elaborate schematization. Undertaking such schematization, Professor Weber maintains that he will proceed like an empiricist, looking at poem objectively, even scientifically (he compares himself with an astronomer), and weighing every alternative (p. xii). In so doing, he will provide structural reading of Paradise Regained that will clarify a work which is not only complicated but which in its sublimity is inaccessible and abstruse (p. xiii). His study will be key. to unlock poem's mysteries. Whether such is actually case remains, of course, to be seen. A look at principles upon which Weber's structural analysis is based at least introduces an element of doubt.

Blood flow measurements in skin flaps

For the last 50 years, the empirical approach of set length to width ratios for skin flaps has been held valid. Not until Milton's work in 1971 was this concept challenged. This report presents a method where precise, reproducible, and quantitative measurements of skin blood flow can be made using four radioactive nuclide microspheres and measures the blood flow changes in flaps of differing length to width ratios. Conclusions from our data suggest that the cutaneous blood flow in ventrally based, abdominal skin flaps in dogs is independent of base width as measured immediately after outlining and elevation.

Homage to Milton

The earliest memory I have of Milton Babbitt is of a performance at the Princeton Graduate School by Bethany Beardslee and JacquesLouis Monod of The Widow's Lament in Springtime, the words by William Carlos Williams. It must, I think, have taken place soon after I came to Princeton, and would therefore have been some time in 1945 or 1946. Hearing this performance was an extraordinary experience. I knew then very little of contemporary music: I even remember that listening only a short time before to a playing of Bart6k's Fifth String Quartet had fascinated me but made me slightly ill-queasy with the effort of trying to understand and with the frustration of misplaced expectation. The Widow's Lament moved me literally to tears. Part of the effect and the effectiveness of this early song of Milton's comes from its delicate transparency, already characteristic of his writing. This transparency has, indeed, a physical seduction, and it is not simply achieved by a dry spareness: it depends on the inter-acting sonority of the independent lines. At this point in Milton's work, the different layers of sound are still conceived traditionally, as separate contrapuntal strands; but more than any other composer of that time Milton insisted on the vertical control of the series as well as on the horizontal. The series of The Widow's Lament is so constituted that it contains a rising major triad-minor in the inverted descent. (I have tried to check my recollection of this beautiful song by a reference to the score, but the music library at Berkeley (where I am now writing this) has, astonishingly and sadly, no copy.) One remembers Berg's refusal to give up the contrast of major and minor because of their possibilities of dramatic contrast. But Milton does not invoke this contrast or even refer to it musically in the song; nor does he seek out the latent possi-

THE DREAD VOICE IN “LYCIDAS"

ABSTRACT Preoccupation with the two-handed engine in Lycidas has obscured a question raised by the lines which follow: Why is the “dread voice” which has just uttered the denunciation of the clergy said to shrink the streams? Examination of the biblical context of the lines indicates that the shrinking of the streams may be related to the drying up of the Red Sea at the Exodus; this possibility in turn reinforces the suggestion made some years ago that the speaker described as “the Pilot of the Galilean lake” is not necessarily St. Peter. Exegetical tradition, literary precedents, and Milton's other works support the theory that the figure is a composite of Moses, Peter, and Christ. Such an interpretation is in harmony with the allusive ambivalence so markedly present elsewhere in Lycidas. Moreover, the biblical overtones of the dread voice help to define the structure of the poem as a progression from pagan consolation through the partial enlightenment given by the Old Law to the final revelation of the New, a movement reflected in the echoes throughout the poem of its opening phrase, “yet once more."

Blood flow measurements in skin flaps.

For the last 50 years, the empirical approach of set length to width ratios for skin flaps has been held valid. Not until Milton's work in 1971 was this concept challenged. This report represents a method where precise, reproducible, and quantitative measurements of skin blood flow can be made using four radioactive nuclide microspheres and measures the blood flow changes in flaps of differing length to width ratios. Conclusions from our data suggest that the cutaneous blood flow in ventrally based, abdominal skin flaps in dogs is independent of base width as measured immediately after outlining and elevation.

Orpheus and the Dunciad's Narrator

THE RELATIONSHIP between the Latin couplet from Ovid's tale of the death of Orpheus which serves as epigraph to the 1743 Dunciad and The Dunciad itself has never been fully explored, nor do I feel that the issues it raises can be in an essay of this length.' The implications for the poem are simply too vast to be treated in anything short of a full study. What can be accomplished here is an indication of the similarities linking The Dunciad and the Orphic myth, of how the traditional interpretations of Orpheus, especially as seen in Milton's works, come into play, and finally of how the motto suggests a reading of the poem different from the traditional one.2 The motto is from Book XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses: