The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading against the Grain 9780754662532, 2008028760

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
General Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1 The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction
2 Milton in the Eighteenth Century
3 Blake
4 Wordsworth
5 Coleridge
Interchapter: Exploring the Metaphor
6 Byron
7 Shelley
8 Keats
9 Milton in the Twentieth Century
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost

For Gill

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost Reading against the Grain

Jonathon Shears Aberystwyth University, UK

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2009 Jonathon Shears Jonathon Shears has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shears, Jonathon The romantic legacy of Paradise Lost : reading against the grain. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Influence 3. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism 4. Romanticism – Great Britain – History – 19th century I. Title 820.9’145 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shears, Jonathon. The romantic legacy of Paradise Lost : reading against the grain / by Jonathon Shears. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6253-2 (alk. paper) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Influence. 3. English poetry—History and criticism. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR3562.S49 2009 821’.4—dc22 iSBn 9780754662532 (hbk)

2008028760

Contents General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vi vii viii

1

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction

2

Milton in the Eighteenth Century

33

3

Blake

59

4

Wordsworth

83

5

Coleridge

97

1

Interchapter: Exploring the Metaphor

117

6

Byron

121

7

Shelley

139

8

Keats

159

9

Milton in the Twentieth Century

181

Bibliography Index

209 219

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

Acknowledgements There are many people who deserve thanks. I would first like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the award of a twoyear bursary, which enabled me to complete a version of this book as a doctoral thesis. I would also like to thank those teachers and friends from the University of Liverpool who both supported and advised me during my time as a research student. I particularly owe a debt of gratitude to Nick Davis, Edward Burns and Michael Davies who, at different times, gave me advice and encouragement when my will was failing. Most of all I would like to thank my supervisor Bernard Beatty who has given me more than I could possibly repay and without whom this would just not have been possible. At Nottingham I would like to thank Maureen Crisp, Ken Purslow and Geoffrey Bond for their generosity and (material) support and elsewhere Alan Rawes, Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler whose advice has often been so timely. Nicola Trott’s constructive suggestions enabled me to develop my ideas in the direction they have taken, while the kindnesses of Peter Graham and Derek Alsop were much welcome. At Ashgate my heartfelt thanks go to Vincent Newey and Joanne Shattock, to an anonymous reader for insightful feedback and most of all to my commissioning editor Ann Donahue for her continual advice and patience whilst I was preparing the manuscript for publication. Closer to home I want to thank friends and family, especially my parents, sister and the boys, for having faith in me and more than anyone Gill, who has given me more support, understanding and love than I have probably at times deserved.

List of Abbreviations Major Works BSB BW CCW JKP LJK MSP PL ROM SJ SPP WW

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; repr. 1998) Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (7 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general ed. Kathleen Coburn (16 vols, Routledge and Kegan Paul: Princeton University Press, 1969–2001) The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978) Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, 1958) John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longmans, 1971; repr. 1977) Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1998) The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970) Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977) William Wordsworth: the Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; rev. 2000)

Journals BJ The Byron Journal ELN English Language Notes HLQ Huntingdon Library Quarterly K-SJ Keats-Shelley Journal K-SR Keats-Shelley Review MLQ Modern Language Quarterly MS Milton Studies PMLA Papers of the Modern Language Association

List of Abbreviations

PQ Philological Quarterly RES Review of English Studies SAQ South Atlantic Quarterly SP Studies in Philology WC The Wordsworth Circle YES The Yearbook of English Studies

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Chapter 1

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction Critical Reception This book is about the relationship between Paradise Lost and Romantic literature. It is also about the legacy that Romantic readings of Paradise Lost have held, and still hold, on the critical consciousness. It seems curious that in the last decade no one has written at length on such a pervasive subject. It turns up almost everywhere in discussions of Romanticism. Yet, since Lucy Newlyn’s book Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader was published in 1993, a veil of silence appears to have been drawn around the subject suggesting that Newlyn’s is, up until now, the final word on the matter. In 2001, Kay Gilliland Stevenson and Peter J. Kitson made the most recent review of Milton’s reception history in Thomas Corns’ A Companion to Milton. They rightly chose to split the essay into two at the horizon of the Romantic period – explicitly acknowledging that there occurs a sea change in the reception of Paradise Lost at the turn of the eighteenth century. Prior to this, Nicola Trott gave a comprehensive record of Romantic response to Milton in Duncan Wu’s A Companion to Romanticism, but there has been no large-scale attempt made to tackle Newlyn’s provocative thesis that Romantic writers view Milton as a poet of Negative Capability, responding in a metaphorical way to amplify the indeterminacies they see in Milton’s text within their own verse. There can be little argument that Romanticism in its broadest sense conceives both life and poetry to be vitally metaphorical and no longer in terms of stable metaphysics. Mark Sandy has recently argued that the second generation Romantics – namely Shelley and Keats – regard life and verse as does Nietzsche; the individual is merely a bridge to an unspecified future time which will be as pregnant with meaning as is Milton’s Urania brooding over the abyss: ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is



  A good recent example being the account of representations of violence in the French Revolution by Ian Haywood in Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke, 2006). One of the familiar tropes to distinguish a ‘bloody vignette’ is allusion to Paradise Lost: ‘The Jacobin leaders Robespierre, Danton and Marat are a diabolical Miltonic trinity: Danton’s position in the hierarchy, relative to Robespierre, is the equivalent of Beelzebub to Satan in Paradise Lost … This malign intelligence has unleashed plebeian fury onto the streets of Paris’ (p. 78).    Nicola Trott, ‘Milton and the Romantics’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford, 1998), pp. 520–34.

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that he is a going-across and a down-going’. One bridge points to another which points to another and so on beyond our imaginative reach; the poet’s greatest achievement is to embrace his own transience, and so key Romantic poems such as The Fall of Hyperion and The Triumph of Life recount their own inability to provide closure: ‘This perpetual manifestation of creative self-invention in these fragmentary forms, question Enlightenment’s obsession with fixed, totalising, metaphysical explanations of the universe’. It might be argued that the line between Enlightenment metaphysics and Romantic metaphor can only be faintly drawn – Byron for one does not sit easily on the side of the fence that history has erected – but in all relevant senses I think this division holds true. Following the logic of Sandy’s position also suggests that form itself can enact a challenge to stable literary meaning, and I want to stress this point here because my argument later in this book will focus on the different responses characteristic to different forms and genres. One purpose of the Romantic Fragment Poem, for example, as delineated in recent times by Marjorie Levinson, Thomas McFarland and Anne Janowitz is to undermine fixed and stable forms of literature, particularly of the highest of poetic achievement: epic. What a contrast this is to many Romantic pronouncements on epic form, particularly when Paradise Lost is under discussion. We will find that Coleridge is protective: ‘I wish that the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is’; and that Keats steps back from reading in awe ‘the thousand Melancholies and magnificences of this Page – leaves no room for anything to be said thereon, but: “so it is”’. There seems, then, to be an unusual discrepancy at the heart of the Romantic legacy of Paradise Lost. On the one hand the Romantics were respecters of the awesome muscle of epic, on the other posterity perceives them to be formal assassins, designing the death of, if not God as Nietzsche proclaimed, then the stability of poetic form. The discrepancy is partly due to the transference between prose commentary on Milton and the verse products of these poets. Virtually all Romantic writers failed to produce the serious long poem they felt called towards – Wordsworth’s project for The Recluse fell apart, as did Coleridge’s Wanderings of Cain. Keats left both Hyperion poems incomplete, and Shelley’s Triumph of Life was curtailed by his death in Italy (admittedly an event out of his control). Ironically, Byron, who was perhaps least disposed to make epic pronouncements, wrote Don Juan, a type of mock epic, although even this poem was left unfinished. Once again literal fatality coincided  10   Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth, 1961; repr. 1969), p. 44.  10   Mark Sandy, Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Aldershot, 2005), p. 110.  10   See Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and modalities of fragmentation (Princeton, 1981), and Anne Janowitz, England’s ruins: poetic purpose and national landscape (Oxford, 1990). I discuss Marjorie Levinson’s work on fragments in more detail later in this chapter.  10   Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, 1998), p. 84.

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with the death of the poem. It has long been understood that Romantic inheritors of Milton’s epic gauntlet were unable to sustain a mythology coherent enough to rival Milton’s Christian universe, or to produce a sustainable universe within the imagination as they also felt Milton had done. This is where the Keatsian awe comes in, but also an accompanying degree of resentment, most notably in Keats’s letter to Reynolds following his failure to complete the first Hyperion poem: ‘Life to him would be death to me’. It is one thing, however, allowing Romantic poets to wave a flag for metaphorical indeterminacy that might challenge stable metaphysical versions of the world. It is another to claim that, rather than impose such views on Paradise Lost, Milton himself authors a text which obeys the law of the Nietzschean Superman rather than the Christian Christ. Thomas Peacock has much fun in exposing the Coleridgean philosopher in Nightmare Abbey who asserts his personal perception as though it were absolute: According to Berkeley, the esse of things is percipi. They exist as they are perceived. But, leaving for the present, as far as relates to the material world, the materialists, hyloists, and antihyloists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed A subtle question, raised among Those out o’ their wits, and those I’ the wrong For only we transcendentalists are in the right: we may very safely assert that the esse of happiness is percipi. It exists as it is perceived.

One of the features of Romantic misreading is that subjective perception objectifies its authority in this way – only a short step lies between this and Harold Bloom’s antithetical criticism in which poetry is ‘a concept of happening and not a concept of being’. Yet this is not quite the argument that Lucy Newlyn offers by subscribing wholeheartedly to the Romantic legacy of reading Paradise Lost. Newlyn reads Paradise Lost as metaphorical in its ambiguity, full of genuine contradictions, not metaphysical in its exactitude – it is a reading that I am going to counter in the present book. That is not to say it is my intention to spend this book attempting to refute Newlyn wholesale; rather, I take this most recent of studies as one significant departure point in engaging with a broad swathe of contemporary and Romantic criticism of Paradise Lost. It seems appropriate to take issue with Newlyn’s work first because this is where we are up to. She is not alone, however: Catherine Belsey’s deconstructionist take on Paradise Lost is not unlike Newlyn’s. Belsey writes of the futility of pursuing ‘phantom intention’ and the dangers of mistaking ‘spectral subjectivity’ for meaning.10 Her method  10   LJK, ed. H.E. Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, 1958), vol. 2, p. 212.  10   Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (Ware, 1995), pp. 119–20.  10   Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago and London, 1982), p. 32. 10   Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford, 1988), p. 8.

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derives from the theoretical models of Derrida and Bakhtin amongst others, including an insistence that ‘because the signifier cannot be anchored to a fixed, anterior presence “behind” it, meaning is always unstable, plural, dispersed and disseminated’.11 Newlyn proposes the death of Milton’s God, Belsey the death of the author, but from different perspectives both privilege the demise of singular intention on Milton’s part. The irony of Belsey’s study is that her insistence on plurality outfacing more ‘despotic regimes’ (who take control of meaning ‘to fix it in their own interests’) fixes her own purposes more rigidly to the mid-1980s than Milton’s to the Restoration.12 Stanley Fish makes one of the points that I would like to pursue in the following chapters when he notes that ‘ambivalence, and open-endedness – the watchwords of a criticism that would make Milton into the Romantic liberal some of his readers want him to be – are not constitutive features of the poetry but products of a systematic misreading of it, a misreading performed in the poetry by Comus and Satan, a misreading of the poetry as old as Blake and Shelley and as new as Lucy Newlyn’.13 In my view, Fish accurately reads what we could describe as the current ‘Satanist heresy’ or ‘Satanic school’ – he is also correct to assert that there is a direct link between the critical methodology of writers such as Newlyn, Belsey, Stevie Davies, John Rogers and David Mikics and Romantic theorists of literary practice. Hazlitt’s embryonic version of Keats’ Negative Capability shows he is the direct antecedent of Newlyn’s methodology, the only difference being that Hazlitt applies his procedures to Shakespeare rather than to Milton: ‘The genius of Milton was essentially undramatic: he saw all objects from his own point of view, and with certain preferences. Shakespear [sic], on the contrary … left virtue and vice, folly and wisdom, right and wrong, to fight it out between themselves’. Newlyn is right, however, to emphasise that Romantic writers really did attribute such a sacrifice of authorial control to Milton as well. What this leads to is a conflict of ‘Miltons’ that Newlyn explains: [There exists an] apparent contradiction between the ‘Milton’ who is constructed through conscious and explicit acts of appropriation and the Milton who emerges from carefully receptive and imitative habits of allusion. The first is a model of authority, intentionality, and religious certainty – a caricature of the deified imagination, which the Romantic readers frequently contrast with the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare. The second is a collocation of ambiguities and indeterminacies, gathered from the Romantics’ close reading (and rereading) of Paradise Lost.14

11

  Belsey, pp. 6–7.   Belsey, p. 8. 13   Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. 14. 14   Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), pp. 4–5. 12

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What this serves to also describe is, to all intents and purposes, the division between Newlyn herself and Fish. In recent years Fish has clarified his own position, originally drawn in Surpised by Sin (1967), to include Newlyn’s (and by implication the Romantics’) own methods as part of his/Milton’s educative process through which readers are brought from the waywardness of multiple misreadings to the stability of one stateable, whilst complex, authorial intention. Paradise Lost becomes on one level an allegory of its own recent reception history. Where Belsey and Newlyn read a multiplicity of contrary intentions, through the clash of religious and classical poetic registers, Fish locates a pedagogical purpose – readers are brought from multiplicity (metaphoricity) to a clearer understanding of univocal meaning (metaphysicality). This is the state that Lady Alice in Comus and Christ in Paradise Regained intrinsically present – the tempter (whether Comus or Satan) sees contradiction and makes errors by investing too much meaning in what Fish calls ‘surfaces’: The surface form will always say: Look over here or out there for meaning, salvation, illumination, truth. The settled and certain soul will decline the invitation and look within for the perspective in the light of which what is over here or out there is correctly and truly configured.15

I have a lot of sympathy for this reading, but where I draw the line between myself and Fish is in the extent to which he goes to present Milton as a corrective author, the kind to which Newlyn and Belsey object so fiercely. I think this is also at the forefront of Lewalski’s mind when she writes that ‘I do not see Milton as a rigorous and punitive teacher, forcing readers into frequent and inevitable mistakes in reading and thereby causing them to recognize and reenact their own fallenness’.16 There is a general critical consensus that Milton’s aim is partially pedagogic, but like Lewalski I would rather conceive of Paradise Lost as a poem with the capacity to both delight and instruct, less rigidly corrective than Fish asserts. It is a problem that Charles Martindale also encounters with Fish’s initial reading arguing that ‘there is, I think, deliberate strategy here, though perhaps Milton has not mastered it as fully as Fish believes’.17 Readers may be surprised by sin, and Milton also, as much instinctively and without eschatological ramification, as through being subjected to a remedial strategy. Fish, from the standpoint of his critics, conceives of the poem too overtly as a mechanical experiment – a lot of the fun and pleasure of reading poetry is sacrificed to method. At the other end of the critical spectrum, however, I find one of the difficulties with Newlyn’s reading is that she activates a sense, admittedly   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 31.   Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, 1985), p. 8. 17   Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Bristol, 1986; repr. 2002), p. 39. 15

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sometimes implicit, that if we do not see the epic as falling apart through Milton’s contrary intentions then we will also miss the fun of reading poetry. Ambiguity and pleasure are as synonymous in a reading drenched in the sweat of Romantic critical endeavour as are beauty and truth to Keats. This may be doing a disservice to the intricacies of some of Newlyn’s approach, but crudely put the anxiety remains. By emphasising the pleasures of ambiguity in poetry, and the Romantic receptivity of such moments of ambiguity, Newlyn is coming down firmly on the side of a critical school that begins with Edmund Burke and the Romantics and survives in Freud and Nietzsche but is really taken up as a manifesto by postdeconstructionists such as Harold Bloom and Leslie Brisman. In some ways I suppose that it is inevitable that the Romantic critic and the Miltonist should be opposed – I began by highlighting the historical gap between the Enlightenment and Romanticism that I will emphasise at greater length in the coming chapters. Joseph Wittreich once noted that a division persists between Romanticists and Miltonists which ‘ought to be recognised and explained rather than berated and ignored’18 especially as Milton was in almost every case the Romantics’ favourite poet. This was part of Wittreich’s motivation for collecting together all overt Romantic references to Milton in the invaluable The Romantics on Milton. His other motivation was that Romantic views would not be reduced to a few well known phrases and slogans such as those deriving from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Strangely, since the 1970s when Wittreich made these comments, I think the opposite has actually become true. While the response of Romantic writers is no longer necessarily blurred together under a few slogans, it seems more important than ever to stress the gap that exists, not between Romanticists and Miltonists, but between the verse of Milton and the verse of the Romantic poets. For me there exists a huge difference in intention, attitude to form, poetic allusion and sometimes simply method that demands to be clarified for risk of reading Paradise Lost as if it were written, as Bloom might suggest, by a later poet. Stevie Davies argues that Milton ‘placed himself at the centre of ideological struggle, where language is both weapon and barricade’,19 but I believe that while language may come in forceful aid of Milton’s argument it does not necessarily follow that Miltonic ideology consists of the ambiguity of language. What this study primarily aims to do then, is to reformulate, through a vocabulary of my own, the Romantic reading of Paradise Lost as a misreading – an unsystematic imposition of meaning on to Milton’s text. It will also show that the Romantic misreading continues to have a direct causal effect on the critical discrepancies accompanying the poem in the twenty-first century. Rather than extend ambiguities inherent in the poem, I believe that the Romantic writers used Paradise Lost as a springboard from which to launch their own poetic projects. In the process, however, it seems they dismantled much of Milton’s originary   Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., The Romantics on Milton (Cleveland, 1970), p. 4.   Stevie Davies, Milton (New York and London, 1991), p. 9.

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intentions and much of his poetic form, through their habits of ‘close reading’, to use Newlyn’s phrase. And it is crucial not to miss the emphasis of ‘close’ here. The Romantic writers were all intimate with Milton’s verse and could quote from it at length, but the closeness of their focus on certain parts of Paradise Lost often meant missing the wood for the trees. Parts and Wholes In his latest book, How Milton Works, Stanley Fish elaborates on his earlier position laid down in Surprised by Sin, initially by making the distinction I referred to above between ‘deep truths’ and ‘surface meanings’: If you attend with a certain intensity to Milton’s language … [words] will display a double meaning and structure that correspond to the distinction between inner and outer, the distinction between a deep truth always present and always governing and the appearances and surfaces that seem to be, or seek to be, divorced from it.20

It is important to realise that Fish reads Milton through these contrasts between right and wrong, eschewing the grey area of Romantic ambiguity. The attractions of Comus to Lady Alice, for example, are easily resisted because ‘conviction is not an event mechanically produced but a capacity that depends on the prior state of one’s settled beliefs’.21 From the Lady’s epistemological position there is no debate with Comus as her mind is already decided beforehand – ‘Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind’ (662).22 Linguistic critics of Milton, influenced by the legacy of Romantic literary theory, often miss the emphasis because they inhabit the relativistic hindsight of a ‘what you see depends on where you stand’ philosophy, rather than considering that what you see depends on what you believe.23 The Cavalier persuasions of Comus serve his own immediate sexual end, and it would clearly not be appropriate for the Lady to surrender her virginity to a degenerate enchanter in a dubious forest. In other words, the context is everything – the Lady is quite right to refuse because temptation is offered by Comus as a substitute for the love of God. Comus offers sexual union, amongst other things,   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 31.   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 30. 22   MSP, ed. John Carey (London, 1971), p. 209. All references to Comus are taken from this edition. 23   Davies, Milton, p. 20. The argument of Fish is a counterweight: ‘the field of [Miltonic] perception … is a function of prior inner orientation: what you can see depends radically on what you believe you can see … if something or someone or some concept is not already affirmed in the deepest recesses of your being – if you don’t believe in it – you will be blind to it’, Fish, How Milton Works, p. 25. 20

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as an act valuable in and of itself, rather than as part of a vehicle ‘of the loyalty you continue to affirm to God’.24 In this sense, Christ in Paradise Regained is equally correct to resist all of Satan’s gifts because they are substitutes for God – it is not the intrinsic quality of ‘A table richly spread, in regal mode’ which makes it evil (just as the apple has no merit of itself) but what the feast represents in this context. This is the essence of Fish’s distinction between ‘deep truths’ and ‘surface meanings’ – Comus and the Satan of Paradise Regained cannot understand the totality of view in which Lady Alice and Milton’s Christ find their being. I believe that the distinction Fish makes holds true, but I would rather begin my study by engaging with an equally profound distinction for Romantic misreading that Fish makes in passing: ‘In the world as [Milton] conceives it to be, truth and certainty are achieved not by moving from evidence gathered in discrete bits to general conclusions, but by putting in place general conclusions in the light of which evidence will then appear’.25 To me this seems to be an articulation of the fundamental disunity not only between characters such as Alice and Comus, but between Paradise Lost and its Romantic readers as well. The Romantic aesthetic is notoriously fragmentary, something equally manifested in their reading process as I suggest below. For a reader such as Coleridge, the part truly is greater than the whole, but it is important to recognise first that the privileging of parts or fragments is a moral as much as an aesthetic issue. Fish makes it apparent that in the case of Milton, deriving views exclusively from a local context will almost always result in trespassing into the garden of misreading. I am aware that I am drawing direct parallels between the actions of Milton’s characters and the actions of his reader – a device also at the heart of Fish’s work – but the matter of succumbing to temptation within the text of Paradise Lost and the process of misreading that text are undoubtedly transferable.26 In this way the moral and aesthetic issues that are presented in reading Paradise Lost are united. Fish phrases the subject of temptation exactly as I would like to consider the Romantic practice of reading and misreading Milton: ‘this is precisely the temptation: to think that particulars have an existence in and of themselves’.27 Once particulars are subtracted from a wider system of meaning they take on a variety of implications rather than a single explication – the movement from the metaphysical to the metaphorical that I have already posited:   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 22.   Fish, How Milton Works, pp. 23–4. 26   Lucy Newlyn supports this feature of Paradise Lost: ‘Thus the confusion that Milton allows between fallen and unfallen language (or between innocent and experienced perspectives) can be understood in terms of the gain of human subjectivity which is consequent on falling; and it can be celebrated as such, even while there is an apparent lamenting of the loss of Adamic language, the disappearance of original plenitude and pre-lapsarian truth. Linguistic indeterminacy is thereby made a function of imaginative activity’, Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 8. 27   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 33. 24

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once particulars are separated from the larger context that stabilized their identities, value, and meaning, there opens up the possibility of assigning (or claiming) other identities, inventing plural values, and discovering many (perhaps conflicting) meanings; there opens up, in short, a space or a gap in which one can search for what has been lost or missed, a search that would be unnecessary had the initial error – the breaking of union, the worship of false gods, the desire to be God, the substitution of plural meanings for god’s meaning – never been made.28

M.H. Abrams described the same phenomenon in reading Paradise Lost as opening up ‘the vista of an infinite regress’.29 It would be wrong to ignore the point at which sinning and reading meet – each of Milton’s sinners is a type of misreader, and each misreader is consequently a type of sinner. The act of embracing ‘plural values’ is directly equivalent to discovering ‘plural meanings’ – the two ought to be elided because they are essentially the same. To clarify my purpose, let me give you an example from Samson Agonistes. Samson is a figure less settled in his epistemological understanding than the Lady Alice. Samson has not been enlightened by his imprisonment (quite the opposite in fact as the discussion of his blindness reveals). Samson’s early speeches prefigure those of Milton’s Satan or even Shelley’s Prometheus, and the emphasis is not on gain but on loss. Significantly, Milton also places the centre of Samson’s continuing misreading of his actions on the conflation of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’: Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke; Yet stay, let me not rashly call in doubt Divine prediction; what if all foretold Had been fulfilled but through my own default, Whom have I to complain of but myself? Who this high gift of strength committed to me, In what part lodged, how easily bereft me, Under the seal of silence could not keep, But weakly to a woman must reveal it, O’ercome with importunity and tears. (38–51)30

28

    30   29

Fish, How Milton Works, pp. 36–7. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York and Oxford, 1953), p. 254. MSP, p 346. All references to Samson Agonistes are taken from this edition.

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There is a trace in Samson’s lines of blame for uxoriousness, which some theologians attributed to Adam – Dalila gains Samson’s complicity through noticeably feminine tears. Later, she also derives her secular strength from her silence, as we will find Wordsworth’s discharged soldier of The Prelude also does, opposed here to Samson’s misplaced articulacy. The passage shows Samson, however, very much in the process of learning rather than merely grieving, which I will argue is not true of Wordsworth. He makes the distinction that Raphael must make for Adam between foreknowledge and the willed misuse of God’s goodness. Samson mockingly terms himself ‘deliverer’, in contrast to the genuine deliverance of God: ‘Deliver Israel, O God: out of all his troubles’ (Psalms, 26:6); ‘He shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines’ (Judges, 13:5). The key line is ‘In what part lodged, so easily bereft of me’; indicating the position to which Samson has arrived at this point. He rightly uses the word ‘lodged’ – God’s gift of strength, like His gift of Chastity to Lady Alice, is easily lost. The permanence, or endurance, of any of God’s freely given gifts must be equally freely maintained by the receiver. What Samson misunderstands is that his physical strength stands alone, lodging in a ‘part’, namely his hair. Samson separates strength from wisdom and the Cardinal virtues with which it must be allied to take its full meaning. At this point he bemoans the loss of physical strength alone, whilst understanding that he has forfeited a gift from God. It is interesting to note just how many times Samson employs the word ‘part’, or a variant such as ‘apart’, in the opening 100 lines of the tragedy: ‘Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,/ And all her various objects of delight/ Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased’ (70–73); ‘strength is my bane,/ And proves the source of all my miseries;/ So many and so huge, that each apart/ Would ask a life to wail’ (63–6). Almost inevitably for Milton, the most significant use of the word relates to the recurring issue of his (and Samson’s) blindness: Since light so necessary is to life, And almost life itself, if it be true, That light is in the soul, She all in every part; why was the sight To such a tender ball as the eye confined? So obvious and so easy to be quenched, And not as feeling through all parts diffused. (90–96)

Each of these instances contains a significant misreading by Samson of his current imprisonment and pitiable physical state. The first, typically Miltonic, confusion is between the light of God’s creativity, the ‘inward light’ that inspires the poet of Paradise Lost, and the light of the sun. The former is the ‘holy light’ at the beginning of Book three, which I will argue so appealed to Coleridge, distinguished, as it is in the Book of Genesis, from the sun (a later creation). The major theological mistake that Samson makes is to suggest that his grief might be ‘partly’ eased by the restoration of his eyesight. His continual anatomisation of his woe repeats the

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error of substituting physical for spiritual suffering – the separation of the body from the soul, the part from the whole. Samson’s grief could be totally eased or not at all – for Milton there are no degrees or quibbles when it comes to sin. It follows that Samson mistakes when he believes he can partition his sorrows and deal with each separately – they are a manifestation of the holistic sin, not ailments that can be isolated and then cured. Just like Satan’s temptation of Christ with a magnificent banquet, Samson’s hair or eyes mean nothing as physical entities. A more compact version of this motif occurs when Satan is translated into a serpent in Paradise Lost Book ten. Satan first notices with surprise that, rather than applaud his part in the Fall, the devils instead hiss him: ‘the sound of public scorn’. That moment of confusion is immediately overshadowed by the realisation that he is hissing as well: He wondered, but not long Had leisure, wondering at himself now more; His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining Each other, till supplanted down he fell A monstrous serpent on his belly prone, Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned, According to his doom. (PL, X, 509–17)

Thomas Corns suggests that ‘while it is a descriptive tour de force, it seems out of proportion to its significance within the resolution of the epic’.31 But while it is true that Milton’s depiction of Satan’s translation ‘manifests the supreme baroque artist’s capacity to represent metamorphosis’,32 it is also proper to dwell on the irony of his punishment ‘in the shape he sinned’. More than just engage the imagination, Milton captures with astonishing precision the gradual moral unwinding, through rapid physical compression, of God’s punishment. Satan’s feeling of panic that accompanies the sudden constriction is intense: ‘His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining/ Each other’. Significantly, the lines initially suggest that the arms and legs move of their own volition – again this is appropriate because it emphasises that Satan fell through his own sin – before God’s role is confirmed with the reminder of ‘a greater power’ at work. Satan and the reader pass through several stages – the shock at his audience’s response, the realisation that he also hisses, the further shock that he is physically altering, the confirmation that he has been metamorphosed into a serpent and the final most significant fact that the process was a physical manifestation of God’s spiritual punishment. A physical part gradually reveals its place in the wider moral and theological scheme. This is not pedagogic – a version of surprise via sin – so much as the unravelling of   Thomas N. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost (London and New York, 1994), p. 34.   Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost, p. 34.

31 32

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Satanic contradiction through poetry that enacts its own purpose. We are always in accordance with the nature of Satan’s ‘doom’, unlike the character, but still undertake the successive experience of reading and understanding poetry. Corns rightly notes that ‘Milton’s larger purpose … is to rehearse at length that point which Satan has declined fully to accept, namely, that God’s power over him is utterly transcendent’.33 I would go further and argue that on a local level the passage becomes an example and a performance of Milton’s trafficking between small and large, physical and moral, part and whole. By reading the transformation of Satan or the tormented psychological tragedy of Samson Agonistes in this way, the logic of promoting the part above the whole is redressed. Samson noticeably becomes less like the Satan of Paradise Lost and more like the Christ of Paradise Regained as the play moves on. Where Lady Alice is the finished article and Comus is largely ceremonial, the drama of Samson is genuinely a drama because he goes through a process designed to increase his understanding. The discourse of parts and wholes continues throughout the play, and it is interesting to record that Dalila, like Milton’s Satan, mistakenly views herself as a ‘whole’ – a self – sufficient entity. In contrast to Samson, her position is more firmly entrenched in sin: ‘Here I should still enjoy thee day and night/ Mine and love’s prisoner, not the Philistines’,/ Whole to myself, unhazarded abroad,/ Fearless at home of partners in my love’ (807–10). There is almost a strange inversion of the Miltonic tempter in the character of Dalila – Samson has already succumbed to temptation and has become a commodity that Dalila can devour ‘whole to myself’. The phrase ‘whole to myself’ rings a Romantic and Satanic bell – Dalila is the subjective devourer who feasts on a part of God’s creation (Samson) which is entire and sufficient in its own right. As I will argue, the Romantic poets tend to feast on parts or fragments of Milton’s poem in much the same way as Keats describes his reading, ‘I long to feast upon old Homer as we have upon Shakespeare. and as I have lately upon Milton’.34 Samson not only abstracts parts of his suffering from the whole story but also elects these parts at the neglect, or even expense, of a larger truth. A moral and theological misalignment ensues that results in his tragedy. The Fragmentary Aesthetic I consider the small and large-scale theological errors of a character like Samson – and more importantly Satan and Adam in Paradise Lost – as akin to Romantic piecemeal readings of the poem. I shall return to the issue of Milton’s movements between the aesthetic and the moral at various stages during my discussion of the six major Romantic writers, but I should now address some of the theoretical bases on which my version of Romantic misreading seems to touch. The ideology 33

   

34

Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost, p. 34. LJK, vol. 1, p. 274.

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that governs the partial or piecemeal temperament is not dissimilar to Marjorie Levinson’s taxonomy of the Romantic Fragment Poems so we should consider these. Levinson deals primarily with writing, while I am dealing in the first instance with reading. Even so, the relationship between Romantic reading and writing as regards a fragmented aesthetic is worth pausing over. Levinson argues that the production of poems as fragments had, by the Romantic period, become an ideological as well as a formal issue. There were many reasons why this was the case, but the one that really interests me is that a poetic fragment allowed the poet to ostentatiously defer eschatological evaluation, thus engaging the reader through the exercise of the imagination: ‘readers mentally complete/construct such poems by generating the missing parts … In other words, one first ascertains the spatial logic or generative principle that organises the fragment’s discourse. Then using that template and by way of rather fundamental cognitive acts, one imagines the missing text or context’.35 The cognitive function generated by such partial Romantic poems as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion or even Rogers’s The Voyage of Columbus is the reader’s attempt to find what we could call the ‘generative principle’. Without a posited, sometimes implied, textual endpoint – in other words if a poem does not so much end as stop – the reader is forced to develop strategies of engagement that lead to other generative principles than beginnings, middles and ends. Sometimes these principles are generated by an organically or internally apparent logic, at other times there exists an a priori context by which to engage with the meaning of a fragment. As Levinson notes, The Faerie Queene would be a good example of the former – the regular stanzas and serialised events order a stable meaning that would not be altered or modified were Spenser’s intended but unwritten Cantos to be suddenly discovered. An example of the latter would be Lermontov’s epistolary novel, A Hero of our Time; the incompletion is signposted by a Preface and absent events may be imagined after but are continually ordered by those presented. The fragmentation is a strategy in the latter, an accident in the former. The Romantic Fragment Poem is a new cultural phenomenon to my mind because it does not make the distinction between chance and design explicit. In fact it does the very opposite. In each case the reader intuitively arranged events in a context dependent on factors other than teleology or eschatology: ‘The acceptance of the fragment qua fragment – its constitution as a literary form – argues that readers solved these problems by developing expectations peculiar to these works and by modifying general and prevailing reception practices accordingly’.36 The Romantic Fragment Poem places expectations on the reader that problematise reception acts. The governing conceptual device is in almost all cases, however, the imagination. Textual indeterminacy becomes a function of the Romantic imagination which thrives on the speculation ensuing from   Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), pp. 25–6. 36   Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 36. 35

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incompletion: ‘In Shelley’s phrase, fragments are the “baffling models of succeeding generations.” They tease us into and out of thought by never fully surrendering to our understanding – or, never capitulating to the agencies that enable that understanding’.37 Levinson’s discussion returns to the same point alternatively expressed; ‘agencies that enable understanding’ is another way of phrasing ‘generative principle’, or as she puts it elsewhere ‘the particular reading paradigm selected’.38 No matter what the specific features of the fragment under discussion, the general purpose and effect will be the same, an effect that reads not unlike Newlyn’s Romantic version of ambiguity: ‘Each fragment form details a strategy for closure, a strategy based on an initial and distinct impression of absence and difference’.39 It might be argued that incomplete Romantic poems rely wholly on the inability to provide closure, but the invitation to completion through what is left out or mislaid – ‘absence and difference’ – is one way of achieving ‘plural values’ or ‘plural meanings’ through formal technique. Levinson’s theory of fragments and Newlyn’s theory of allusion are worth looking at in tandem as regards Paradise Lost because they both sustain the ‘aesthetic potential of irresolution’ that is a fundamental characteristic of the Romantic imagination. The problem that arises when the influence of Milton is included in the mix is that Milton was a poet whose ‘generative principle’ was neither the Romantic imagination nor the Romantic Fragment Poem. In these terms, the question that this book poses and answers is quite a simple one: what occurs when an inappropriate principle of organisation, or reading paradigm, is posthumously applied to Paradise Lost? The primary Romantic paradigm shift seems to be the fragmentation of the poem by giving small sections competitive precedence over large-scale meaning. But before moving on, it is worth taking a brief example from a Romantic reading of Milton in order to give a more precise flavour of, and also a few potential reasons for, my reading. The following lines are taken from Keats’s famous marginalia to his twovolume edition of Paradise Lost, and I believe they are representative of the Romantic ideology of the part or fragment at work during reading: A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell; hope never comes That comes to all (PL, I, 61–7)40

37

    39   40   38

Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 33. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 34. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 27. Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, 1998), p. 74.

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The italicised lines here are those that Keats underscored and are indicative of his reading habits that I will discuss at length in Chapter eight. For the moment it is enough to point out that Keats is driven to extract intense moments of beauty, emotion, passion, joy or sorrow from Milton’s verse. His temperament is lyrical rather than narrative. He is attracted particularly to contrasts of short clauses and longer enjambed lines. Often, selected passages are linked to a very specific location or an unidentifiable location. The extract above exhibits all of these features, often in combination as in ‘regions of sorrow’ and ‘doleful shades’: Keats thrives on Milton’s gently drawn pathetic fallacy. Equally, his eye is attracted not to the dungeon but to the less precise ‘regions’ defined in negative – ‘never dwell’, ‘never comes’ – absence becomes swiftly filled through Keats’s presence in the text as a reader. The marginalia, recently edited by Beth Lau, offer us the chance to read Paradise Lost as though Keats rather than Milton authored it, emphasising the distinction I want to continually retain between Milton and his Romantic descendants. Keats abstracts a brief intense section of Milton’s narrative and gorges upon it. The marginal note that accompanies the passage emphasises that Keats, like Milton, is operating in a vocabulary of parts and wholes; the distinction to be drawn is that in Keats’s case the issue is not moral but imaginative and primarily ambiguous: ‘One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another. Things may be described by a Man’s self in parts so as to make a grand whole which that Man himself would scarcely inform to its excess’.41 Keats enters Milton’s text, and imagination, in a piecemeal way through selected fragments that allow him to imagine after but not succeed in grasping the whole from the part. Even the speculation of this notion is ‘semi’ – a half formed thought suggesting the part replacing the textual whole. Milton is presented as a relic of another age and the rest must be imagined after – the Romantic imagination deals in these half formed notions and it is not surprising to find Wordsworth making an identical point: Oftentimes, at least, Me hath such deep entrancement half-possess’d, When I have held a volume in my hand Poor earthly casket of immortal Verse! Shakespeare, or Milton, Labourers divine! (1805 Prelude, V, 161–5)42

A fuller explication of Keats’s, and Wordsworth’s, particular reading paradigm can wait until later, but the passage from Keats’s marginalia offers enough to suggest not only that he reads in a fragmented fashion but that these fragments are organised to an end other than that of epic or ethical exegesis. Keats speculates on Milton as though he were Herbert or Vaughan: ‘A Poet can seldom have justice 41

   

42

Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 74. WW, p. 438.

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done to his imagination – for men are as distinct in their conceptions of material shadowings as they are in matters of spiritual understanding’.43 The essence of Keats’s conjecture on the range of Milton’s imagination is the replacement of substance by shadow. The narrative of the Fall is, for Keats, merely a reflection of Milton dappled on the stream of language. As I will show, the Romantics read Paradise Lost less as a work of epic fiction as Milton intended than as a brand of spiritual or lyrical outpouring. I would borrow another of Levinson’s comments on the Romantic Fragment Poem to make the point clear. She writes that ‘readers tended … to experience these poems not as defective essays at one excellence but as successful examples of another’.44 The Romantics read Paradise Lost as a successful example of other excellences than epic and so any attempt to establish moral certitude would become, for them, defective. Recovering Milton’s Paradigm Much of my discussion has so far concerned the issue of epic form, although in one sense intertextuality is the evasion of formalism in its purest sense because it throws language open to the plural and potentially competitive contexts noted by Fish. Equally criticism is, by its nature, an act of reordering and reconstitution, a transgressive procedure in which the critic ‘apprehends the order that is the poem, and through the act of criticism recreates that order in a way which makes it accessible to the reader’.45 The points at which textual and moral indiscretion meet forms a major part of misreading – Stevie Davies emphasises that the Romantic imagination is usually implicated: ‘Like artists, literary critics are imaginers: their work is to reimagine what has already been imagined’.46 But the difficulty remains as to where one should draw the line between readings that are imposed upon Paradise Lost and those which are drawn from the text. The present study necessarily reimagines and reorders Paradise Lost to a degree but I hope it does not warp the paradigm. I will take a moment to try to define the difference as it occurs in the work of many of Milton’s critics. The recovery of Milton’s paradigm would be a good way of describing the history of his modern reception. Almost all critics of the twentieth century have invested in, or laboured to defend, a generative principle against other hostile principles. Davies argues that ‘the history of Paradise Lost criticism is also, in a unique way, the passionate history of the tribe. Its ideological militancy aggravates opposing attitudes and awakens dormant feelings of anger with authority, release from oppression, or (confusingly) both. For over three centuries it has been getting under the skin of its readers, sparking heated arguments, frequently of great 43

    45   46   44

Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 74. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 36. ROM, p. 20. Davies, Milton, p. 5.

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hostility and volatility of temper, and setting man against man and woman against man’.47 The history of Milton’s readership forms a diachronic agon that rivals the synchronic model of Bloom. But part of the reason for the combustible reception history of Paradise Lost appears to be precisely because the poem is peculiarly prey to Bloomian misprision. Douglas Bush defined the problem as the opening up of a space ‘between what the poet thought he was putting in and what the modern reader found’.48 Interpretative accuracy and authorial intention are not fashionable critical subjects but are difficult to separate from Paradise Lost. Even if Milton’s own opinions cannot be fully determined, I agree with Davies that ‘the processes of composition and readers’ reactions to an imagined “Milton” whose stresses, biases, hopes, wishes and fears they detect in the text, not only should not but cannot be censored from reading practice’.49 For Romantic readers, an ‘imagined’ Milton is continually being constructed or sought after. If I am going to continue to use the word ‘misreading’, then I feel it is important to define it more precisely. What then constitutes a misreading? First and foremost a misreading implies that a stability of understanding has been read wrongly, with an assumption that there exists a reading congruent with the originating circumstances of the text. Milton offers the reader his intended paradigm in the opening section of Book one – so famous and unavoidable that it almost requires no quotation – ‘may I assert eternal providence,/ And justify the ways of God to men’ (I, 25–6). It is Milton’s starting point and for the purposes of everything that follows in this book it will be my starting point as well. Paradise Lost is primarily a moral poem that explores again the events and consequences of the Fall as told in the Book of Genesis. Milton attributes blame to the failure of the will of Adam and Eve to choose God’s goodness over the temptation of Satan. The apple and its apparent attendant – knowledge – is eaten against God’s clear instruction and given value contrary to the will of God. My paraphrase of the plot may seem unnecessary, but the details are worth stating openly as the Romantic misreading blurs these original intentions. Milton provides his reader with a reading paradigm that, I will argue, the Romantics shift for their own purposes. Levinson is right to argue that ‘readers want an experience of resolution from poetry’, and she is also correct to note that ‘where this is withheld … they will develop a closural effect from the materials and principles at hand’.50 But what if this logic is turned on its head: not to argue that readers want an experience of irresolution – although I believe that in many instances Romantic poets do – but to suggest that they contrive a closural effect from materials and principles other than those at hand? What if a reader is presented with a perfectly sound and applicable route of closure but complicates, or even rejects, this route as being somehow unsatisfactory? For the 47

    49   50   48

Davies, Milton, pp. 7–8. Douglas Bush, ‘Recent Criticism of Paradise Lost’, PQ, 28 (1949): 36, 31–43. Davies, Milton, p.7. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, p. 25.

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purposes of this book I will use these factors as the yardstick by which to measure misreading. In the case of Paradise Lost, the suspicion that Milton intended something competitive to his stated objective derives, I think, from the combination of a Romantic love of the unresolved and a desire to compete with the given argument. Romantic readings of Milton tend to vacillate between the fairly straightforward and observable latter inclination and the naturally more discreet, but indefinite, former. In each case, however, I think that the signal characteristic of such a reading is the misalignment of multiplicity and singularity, parts and wholes and the promotion of the imagination above ethics. Lucy Newlyn represents largely what the Romantics’ believed – that Paradise Lost was a gallimaufry of contrary intentions designed to activate the imagination and pose irresolvable moral questions. But irresolution was and still is a quality Romantically attributed to Paradise Lost rather than an inherent feature: ‘the incremental effect on the reader of these ambiguous poetic modes is such as to qualify any moral “message” that it is supposed Milton intends to convey’.51 Ambiguity is the primary Romantic response to Paradise Lost whilst not being its primary mode, and readers are consistently attracted to indeterminate features in the text in order to privilege them ahead of Milton’s stated purpose. Davies notes that ‘Modern criticism emphasises, with justice, the embattled intelligence in relation to the self-conflicting text’.52 Just as with Newlyn and Belsey, the major sites of textual self-conflict depend upon a premise that ‘literary language is polysemous’, and I would not dispute that the primary verbal attractiveness of poetry, even Milton’s, is its ability to express and hold multiple meanings. Milton is, after all, one of the most notorious users of puns in the language, playing on Latin and Greek etymology and linguistic variety, most relevantly in the way he can use language to engineer a gap between innocent and fallen comprehension of the actions that occur in Eden. But just like Newlyn and Belsey, I think Davies too idly equates verbal polysemy with wholesale contradiction – the two are not identical. There can be little doubt that ‘Paradise Lost fabricates a language of men and of angels in its original purity and charts the fall of that language into a linguistic field of ambiguity, double entendre, pun, innuendo, self-deception and rancorous abuse’.53 The gap between fallen and unfallen cannot be a genuine one due to the poet’s lapsed medium: language. The tension engineered, however, is more than adequate to illustrate and communicate Milton’s purpose – we do not need to think outside language to understand that prelapsarian Eden must be a verbal contrivance. Another reason that polysemy and ambiguity have become so attractive regarding Paradise Lost is the gradual secularisation of literary criticism. Douglas Bush put the point well: ‘Criticism of the 19th Century and early 20th, inspired by Blake and Shelley, by the Whig view of history, and by a secular liberalism in 51

    53   52

Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 6. Davies, Milton, p. 5. Davies, Milton, p. 25.

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general, was given to celebrating Milton as the great rebel and great artist while neglecting, misinterpreting, or deploring his supposed religious beliefs’.54 Even the most conservative of Milton’s twentieth-century critics, including Bush and French Fogle, felt that a period of cultural generosity following World War II might free Milton’s humanism from narrow and misplaced accusations of Puritanism. René Wellek also sensed that a liberal age was required to redress the attacks on Milton’s use of language made by Leavis and Eliot: ‘We are now in a period of the elaboration of the language and poets can afford to pay attention to the experiments of Milton’.55 The desire to democratise Milton can even be felt as an odd form of bullying: ‘A holistic reading practice must also resist the privileging of the academic readership over the common reader’ [my italics].56 Fish argues (and the historical evidence bears him out) that Milton was in no way a liberal and that part of misreading is an urge to invest a great poet with the politics of the modern western world: ‘[Liberal traits] are not … qualities Milton admires; and while their absence in his work might properly be a reason for declining to read it, it should not be a reason for rewriting it in the name of values he everywhere rejects’.57 One of Milton’s most important critics, A.J.A. Waldock, actually gives the impression that at most places in Paradise Lost he is inclined not to read precisely because Milton is openly illiberal. For Waldock, Milton’s perceived humanism is felt to jar against the myth of his own story ‘drawing [Milton] away from what most deeply absorbs him (effort, combat, the life of the “wayfaring Christian”) to the celebration of a state of affairs which could never have profoundly interested him, and that he never persuades us does’.58 Waldock makes more of the matter than is perhaps warranted, although there is truth in Milton’s desire to produce a work tackling the virtues of the uncloistered wayfarer that Spenser had earlier celebrated in The Faerie Queene – temperance, holiness, and chastity. Indeed, the genesis of Paradise Lost, emerging from Milton’s original intention to produce an epic (or even drama) on Arthurian (and also Homeric) lines, complicates a discussion of the form of the poem. There does appear to be some remnant of the dramatic embryo of Paradise Lost, especially in certain speeches of Satan’s, as Empson has confirmed.59 Yet, Milton’s purpose in using the narrative of the Fall was always to foreground his belief in the desirability of man’s obedience to God through the exercise of his (free) will.60   Bush, ‘Recent criticism of Paradise Lost’, 34.   René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 (8 vols, New Haven, 1986), vol. 5, p. 194. 56   Davies, Milton, p. 22. 57   Fish, How Milton Works, p. 4. 58   A.J.A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics (Gloucester, 1959), pp. 23–4. 59   William Empson, Milton’s God (London, 1961), p. 61. 60   ‘The great significance of the Fall is that it is not reversible by human effort or action. Up until the overt act, Adam and Eve could have changed their minds. But once the evil act had sealed the evil will, Man could only be redeemed by Christ’s Incarnation and 54 55

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As regards Paradise Lost, Waldock’s wayfarer could only translate into the decidedly un-Spenserian character of Satan; indeed we could substitute the one for the other. But Waldock’s denial of Milton’s declared intentions and also the responsibilities of man to God, and his substitution of the values of an heroic (and generally Pagan) age, is to invest authority in a subtext that challenges the priority of both the poet and a Christian God. In other words, Waldock openly and completely opposes authorial intention. Like Davies, his reading creates the scenario of the poet writing in active opposition to his own story, something which we shall also see advanced by Gordon Teskey in more recent times. Long before Newlyn and Davies there existed, then, a persistent notion that Paradise Lost abounds with ambiguity and inconsistencies and that Milton’s declared paradigm is not sufficient to account for them all. Leavis makes this argument, as in various ways do Saurat, Tillyard, Waldock, Empson, Brisman and Bloom. Undoubtedly the originators of such an unstable metaphorical reading of Paradise Lost are the Romantics and the fact that there is a direct causal link between the theory of Newlyn and writers such as Hazlitt and Keats is testimony to her own endorsement of what Clifford Siskin calls the ‘ongoing power of the discourse’ of Romanticism.61 Newlyn’s methodology, deriving from Romantic misreading, means that her belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I will trace the origins of this prophecy to Romanticism. Allusion In looking at Romantic readings of Milton I will often mention allusion to Paradise Lost and so allusion as a conceptual issue requires some acknowledgement in this introduction. The body of this book contains discussion of many varieties of allusive practice and intertextuality that I do not seek to make homogenous: verbal echoes of Paradise Lost, structural invocations, the use of similar subject matter and a more general sense of shared (sometimes competitive) ideas and historical contexts. The way Romantic writers invoke or allude to Paradise Lost is so varied – often discreet, sometimes bold – that it seems pointless to direct energy towards elaborating on a type of allusive practice that we could call distinctly Romantic. If such an identifiable habit exists, then Lucy Newlyn has done such a comprehensive job of delineation as to leave little space for further comment. Having made this point, however, it is true to note that the practice of allusion itself might raise an objection to the way I read Paradise Lost, and so I must address the issue here. Allusion is not a one-way street, and is it not the case that, just like the Romantics, Milton is a poet who relies heavily on allusion to prior works? Classical scholars Crucifixion’. H.V.S. Ogden, ‘The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered’, PQ, 36 (1957): 3, 1–19. Ogden is right to stress the fact that the failure of Adam and Eve’s will should not be considered inevitable. 61   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, pp. 12–13.

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have actually read Paradise Lost as a fragmented text because it underwent a process of piecemeal creation. Is it not also the case that there is an inherent disruption of form in Paradise Lost, precisely a result of the alloy of Classical and Christian sources of which Milton made use? Newlyn’s opening gambit in describing her theory of allusion makes exactly this point: ‘in stressing the extent to which Romantic tradition was shaped by the assimilation, reformulation, and rejection of values embodied in Paradise Lost, the “revisionary” nature of Romantic allusions has emerged as of prime importance, whereas the continuity between Milton’s own habits of allusion and those of his followers tended to be overlooked’.62 A reader would be right to acknowledge that just as the Romantic poets disordered Paradise Lost into fragments, Milton also created his poem from many and diverse styles, including allusions to sources ranging from his favourite classical authors – Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Horace – to obscure theological tracts. But it is surely stretching the point too far to suggest a genuine continuity between the allusions Milton makes to Homer and those that the Romantics make to Paradise Lost. Barbara Lewalski has called the generic multiplicity of Paradise Lost ‘a panoply of kinds’. She delineates some of the many modes recognised as having classical precedent: The panoply of kinds includes pastoral: landscape descriptions of an Arcadian “happy rural seat of various view” (4.247); ecloguelike passages presenting the otium of Heaven and unfallen Eden; scenes of light georgic gardening activity. Also, the several varieties of embedded lyric in the poem have received some critical attention: celebratory odes, psalmic hymns of praise and thanksgiving, submerged sonnets, epithalamia, love lyrics (aubade, nocturne, sonnet), laments, and complaints. There are also many rhetorical and dialogic kinds which have not been much studied from the perspective of genre: Satan’s several political orations; God’s judicial oration defending his ways; the parliamentary debate in hell over war and peace; the Satan-Abdiel debate over God’s right of sovereignty; a treatise on astronomical systems; a dialogue on human nature between God and Adam and another on love between Raphael and Adam; a lecture on Christian historiography; Satan’s temptation speech to Eve in the style and manner of “some Orator renown’d/ In Athens or free Rome”.63

I have quoted Lewalski’s exhaustive list in full, partly because it saves me compiling a similar list of my own, but mainly to underscore the huge amount of styles and genres that Milton employs. It is not my place to give examples of each of these modes; rather, I want to point to the fact that Milton is heavily allusive in terms of form and literary structure as well as through local verbal instances. His epic is created from plural forms – lyrics, passages of rhetoric, dramatic duologues 62

   

63

Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, pp. 3–4. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 4.

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and soliloquies, all modes that are found entire to themselves or embedded in other forms of literature. But Milton had precedent in creating Paradise Lost in such a way: ‘If we ask why Milton incorporated so complete a spectrum of literary forms and genres in Paradise Lost, a partial answer must be that much Renaissance critical theory supports the notion of epic as a heterocosm or compendium of subjects, forms, and styles’.64 I have already stated that plural form does not necessarily equate to plural intention and that polysemy need not mean the sacrifice of an ideological position. Epic is catholic in its emphasis on the inclusion of as much of life – and therefore literary form – as possible. Milton, because he set out to tackle the biggest subject of all for an artist – the Creation of the world and the relationship of mankind to God – felt the pull of epic for its inclusiveness. It is entirely appropriate then that he should bring all his experience and knowledge of Greek and Hebraic literature to bear in his execution. Milton was also very much typical of his own period of intellectual history in keeping a Commonplace Book containing extracts or proofs from his favourite authorities on a wide range of issues. Many of the headings under which Milton organises his Commonplace Book are present as themes in Paradise Lost and he would undoubtedly have sourced them from this volume. Most important are probably his notes on Ethics including titles such as ‘Moral Evil’, ‘Of the Good Man’ and ‘Of Virtue’. As the nature of a commonplace book is to separate learning into different sections or fragments, it undoubtedly has a bearing on my argument, but the word ‘commonplace’ needs some definition. As Ruth Mohl argues ‘Our modern concept of the “commonplace” as something ordinary, trite, trifling, and therefore worthless is an outgrowth of the original meaning but by no means reflects the very fundamental and significant origin of the term in ancient Greece. For centuries the study of both logic and rhetoric was dependent on the use of commonplaces’.65 Milton would, like Erasmus and Francis Bacon, have kept a commonplace book at school and learnt to order his thoughts in relation to particular sententiae or questions. Rhetoric was taught almost entirely through the collection of topoi, which could be called upon when a particular issue was raised: ‘the speaker has a stock of arguments to which he may turn for particular need’.66 The arguments of Comus, for example, are full of such ‘stock’ phrases and even images, one of the reasons that the Lady Alice easily counters his position. To all intents and purposes, and however beautifully executed the poetry is, Comus might as well have his commonplace book in his hand as source for his ‘overnourished rhetoric’: List, Lady; be not coy, and be not cozened With that same vaunted name, Virginity. Beauty is Nature’s coin; must not be hoarded, 64

    66   65

Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 4. Ruth Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York, 1969), p. 11. Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book, p.12.

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But must be current; and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partaken bliss, Unsavoury in the injoyment of itself. (736–41)

Even so, it should not be thought that Milton relied too heavily on such a document as ‘an aid substituted for memory’,67 and I would endorse the point that ‘though Milton employs commonplaces, there is nothing commonplace about the way that he employs them’.68 Mohl notes, and it is a striking fact, that while Milton’s book contains references to 92 different authors, he only once references his favourite writer Aristotle in a footnote to Ethics. Milton would have known the works of Aristotle, Homer, Virgil and Ovid so well that he would have had no need to note down their wisdom; they came to him as naturally as leaves to a tree.69 In some ways our modern definition of commonplace is entirely misleading then, and Milton’s Commonplace Book primarily contains notes on authors he did not feel confident of committing to memory. The importance to my argument of the Commonplace Book is that it directs our understanding of how Milton employed his classical sources, if not always in specific cases then in general and ideological terms. It also emphasises the gap that I am trying to draw between Romantic concepts of allusion, originality, borrowing, or plagiarism and those held in the Renaissance. The words of the Renaissance schoolmaster, Thomas Farnaby, from whom Mohl quotes, I will add here: Let us not be among those who lay up provisions more of the axioms of others, rather than be distributors of our own ideas. For the pen must be dipped in our mental powers, and an advisory council must be called in the heart; in that way, our mode of expression is to be sharpened.70

On one level, this shows that Bloom’s discussion of anxious influence, which began in his early theory with Milton, was a much earlier phenomenon, as he later acknowledges. But it also demonstrates that the purpose of allusion in Renaissance verse was not to create ambiguity in intention so much as to sharpen expression – to find the best way of phrasing a particular emotion or argument even if this meant relying on past modes of expression. Charles Martindale adds a useful fact that ‘florilegia, assemblages of passages from classical works, were in widespread

  Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book, p. 21.   Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 11. 69   See Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 2: ‘In general the eighteenth-century critics who had the classics in their blood are better guides than many moderns to whom one passage in Homer or Virgil is as foreign as another, and who in consequence are inclined to be overawed by Milton’s classical learning and thus to exaggerate it’. 70   Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book, 21. 67 68

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use both inside and outside the classroom’.71 Hamlet owns such a book and his famous ‘To be or not to be’ speech has been read as an argument arranged by the logic of the florilegia or commonplace. Martindale goes on to make a point that is important for my reading of Paradise Lost: ‘The flores must have encouraged a kind of piecemeal reading, and meant that readers might be familiar with a passage without having read the whole work from which it came’.72 What these flores provided were, to all intents and purposes, ‘shortcuts to knowledge’. Does this therefore mean that Newlyn is correct to argue for continuity between Miltonic and Romantic habits of allusion after all? The simple answer remains no. Virgil imitated Homer, just as Milton imitated both Homer and Virgil through the ‘creative adaptation of old material to a new context and purpose’.73 But to incessantly track down individual sources as points of allusion is to misunderstand the way in which Milton used classical and biblical texts. Martindale argues against the validity of the approach of Francis Blessington, who claimed that the debate in Pandemonium is wholly drawn from Iliad II. In the process, Martindale makes some very interesting observations on the conflation of modern conceptions of allusion with those held in the Renaissance: Certain doubts may be raised against the validity of Blessington’s whole approach … which is characteristic of much modern criticism. First, the method is dangerously open-ended, lacking sufficient checks to subjectivity; as one context is played, with ever increasing ingenuity, against another, almost anything may – and in practice does – result. More importantly, the approach does not seem grounded in a sufficient sense of what imitation as a poetic procedure meant to Renaissance writers. Indeed it probably hides an unconscious unease about the legitimacy of this aspect of Renaissance poetics which may be a partly unacknowledged legacy of Romanticism, with its stress on originality; hence the desire of post-Romantic critics to discover implausible layers of allusive subtlety to justify the practice.74

Martindale might equally be describing Newlyn’s method: ‘one context is played against another’. But Milton’s reading, and allusive, paradigm was very different. When, for example, Satan is linked to Aeneas in Book one (125–6), Martindale suggests that the parallel may be ironic or that ‘the allusion may be less focused, simply giving a Virgilian or epic colour’.75 However attractive it might be to play Aeneas against Satan and argue that Milton was undecided as to whether the comparison ought to be positive or negative, the conclusion remains indisputable that ‘a proper understanding of Milton’s lines in no way depends on a recognition 71

    73   74   75   72

Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 19. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 20. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 18. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 17. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 4.

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of its probable Virgilian basis; the allusion rather supports that understanding or adds an enhancing resonance’.76 Stanley Fish makes a similar point in addressing the famous Eve/Narcissus passage of Paradise Lost Book five that I discuss in my final chapter: allusion does not always suggest similarity but sometimes difference. I am not a classical scholar, but noted one possible example of allusion that seems not to have been previously recorded yet fits Martindale’s pattern. The passage occurs in Paradise Lost Book eleven when Michael first meets Adam: He ended; and the archangel soon drew nigh, Not in his shape celestial, but as man Clad to meet man; over his lucid arms A military vest of purple flowed, Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old In time of truce; Iris had dipped the woof; His starry helm unbuckled showed him prime In manhood where youth ended; by his side, As in a glistering zodiac hung his sword, Satan’s dire dread, and in his hand the spear. (XI, 238–48)

The immediate classical allusion is to Meliboea, a region in Thessaly that was famous for its purple dye, as was Sarra, another name for Tyre. Michael strides forward to meet Adam as though they were Paris and Menelaus about to do battle – ‘In time of truce’ suggests the occasion in Iliad III when hostilities briefly cease for the individual combat. The appearance of Paris in the van is comparable and must, I think, have been in Milton’s mind as a specific point of reference: The beauteous Paris came: In form a god! The panther’s speckled hide Flow’d o’er his armour with an easy pride: His bended bow across his shoulders flung, His sword beside him negligently hung; Two pointed spears he shook with gallant grace, And dared the bravest of the Grecian race. (III, 26–32)77

The similarity between Michael and Paris lies in their appearance, particularly the way they wear their swords. But the difference lies in the way that detail reveals their contrasting moral fibre – Paris’ sword hangs ‘negligently’, anticipating his doubt and cowardice when Menelaus steps forward to accept his challenge, while Michael’s glisters with a ferocious reminder of his defeat of Satan in the war in 76

   

77

Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 4. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope (London, 1902), p. 51.

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Heaven. Equally, Paris taunts the Achaians with his spear, while Michael stands in the certainty that the merit of his spear has already been proved. Most importantly, Michael’s assuredness comes, like Lady Alice’s, from within. His devotion and obedience to God give him an ongoing purpose that is not a characteristic of the capricious Paris. Milton’s use of the phrase ‘prime/ In manhood’ could also be an ironic reference to the youthful immaturity of Paris’ boasts at this point. What is certain is that, far from playing one context against another to undermine Michael’s credibility as an envoy of God, it confirms his stature in comparison with a classical forbear. The possible point of similarity and difference also confirms that the allusion adds another dimension, some local colouring, to the meeting of two important figures. Even if the allusion is not pursued fully, there remains a feeling that the context invoked generally has the flavour of Homer’s Iliad, due to Raphael’s ‘military vest’, his armour and the mention of truce. It may be that ‘Milton is not adapting a particular passage but recreating in English a manner of writing’. The whole sequence has a ‘classical epic timbre’ which is combined with the suggestion of a specific source that Milton wanted to cultivate and then transcend: so Paris and Menelaus meet in physical combat while Raphael visits Adam in peace having already achieved glory. Martindale comments that ‘Milton’s relationship with his classical models is complex and devious’78 – the poet frequently invokes Homer and Virgil to undermine characters and ideas of heroism, but will also raise heroic precedents to undermine his own Satan. Indeed while Michael rises above Paris in the example above, Milton’s Satan tends to sink beneath his allusions to Classical precedents despite his otherwise glorious portrayal. Milton’s Christian beliefs are naturally very different from those held by the Pagan writers of epic, so we would expect some ideological competition, but what we should not expect is Romantic ideological vagueness or the ‘dialogic’ imagination ‘enunciated by Bakhtin, in which the work of art is heard as a many-centred polyphony of voices, challenging rather than reinforcing ideology’.79 Milton draws similarities to claim difference, but can sometimes translate a context wholesale without fearing accusations of plagiarism (as with the example of Mulciber’s Fall in Book one) or even ignore context completely to seize upon an idea for its ‘cosmic grandeur’.80 Martindale is right to argue that each instance of allusion should be taken on its own terms as ‘there is no magic key to Milton’s practice in imitation’.81 Likewise, as his study shows, there are so many varieties and variations of local verbal allusions and wider structural parallels to other texts in Paradise Lost that Milton could never be said to follow, or to have revealed, his own manual of influence. Paradise Lost is an epic that holds many styles and genres, but once again I must stress here that multiplicity of method does not result in relinquishing 78

    80   81   79

Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 76. Davies, Milton, p. 10. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 73. Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, p. 20.

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the dominant reading paradigm. Milton may use many genres and even ‘break generic barriers’ in Paradise Lost, but the plurality of modes is always yoked to his declared argument. Barbara Lewalski endorses the principle I have been advancing: ‘Multiple genres give Milton’s modern epic great complexity, but not the indeterminacy and inconclusiveness Bakhtin identifies as the product of generic multiplicity in the modern novel’.82 The same goes for multiple habits of allusion. Romantic writers will consistently allude to Milton to invite a comparable meaning but ultimately deflect from final evaluation. Milton’s method is much more clearly ordered – Lewalski even goes as far as to argue that Milton’s purpose can be tracked through identifying the way in which the plurality of modes fit together: ‘Paradise Lost is, then, an encyclopedia of literary forms which also affords a probing critique of the values those forms traditionally body forth’.83 The reason that Milton’s Satan is such a glamorous figure is that he has access to the martial rhetoric of an Agamemnon and the soliloquy of a Hamlet. Unlike Gabriel or Raphael, Satan does not have access to ‘higher’ modes of verse such as pastoral and hymn. Each character is defined, limited, or emancipated by the range of literary forms available and appropriate to that character. Hence, Raphael and Gabriel not only find that they need to accommodate Adam through language – ‘Immediate are the acts of God … but to human ears cannot without process of speech be told’ (VII, 176 and 178) – but must also seek out ‘appropriate literary forms to present divine truth’.84 Lewalski argues that both of the archangels charged with the role of subordinate narrators continually readjust their choice of form to accommodate Adam’s understanding. Following the Fall for example, and as Adam moves further from the Godhead, Michael is obliged to change his mode from pictorial-visionary to verbal: ‘I perceive/ thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine/ Must needs impair and weary human sense’ (XII, 8–10). Even Milton as he appears within his own text in the proems of several books alerts the reader to alteration not only in mood but also in form or genre. The opening of Book nine is one such transitional point where the scene switches; on this occasion between the narration of Raphael and the action of the Fall: No more of talk where God or angel guest With man, as with his friend, familiar used To sit indulgent, and with him partake Rural repast, permitting him the while Venial discourse unblamed; I now must change Those notes to tragic-foul distrust and breach Disloyal, on the part of man, revolt And disobedience. (IX, 1–8)

82

    84   83

Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 17. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 23. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 26.

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Milton will, however, make sure that the mood and style of the Fall will be heroic; not merely heroic but greater in both subject and form than that of Homer’s Iliad: ‘sad task, yet argument/ Not less but more heroic than the wrath/ Of stern Achilles’ (IX, 13–15). His only proviso in achieving this aim is whether Urania will furnish him with an ‘answerable style’ (IX, 20). Such heroism in action and idiom may seem to elevate the Fall to the status of fortunate, but it is an intention consonant with the Aristotelian directive of tragedy in which the actions of the great are perverted by their own pride or hubris. It remains consistent to the form that the part of Adam and Eve is viewed from heaven with ‘anger and just rebuke’ (IX, 10). More than alert us to changing genre, the lines above are significant because they demonstrate that Milton was much more aware of his multiple styles and their possible conflation with multiple meanings than some critics allow. Adam has been permitted to sit ‘indulgent’ with Raphael in the previous book and the moment passes without blame from the author or God. Within the word ‘blame’ I also read contradictory intention: like all long poems, Paradise Lost alters in style and tone but such points can pass without effecting the integrity of the work or needing to be seized upon as though the reader had at last exposed Milton as a fraud. Many ramifications and possibilities pass through the mind and imagination during reading in a fashion not unlike the way Adam explains Eve’s dream in Book five: Know that in the soul Are many lesser faculties that serve Reason as chief; among these Fancy next Her office holds; of all external things, Which the five watchful senses represent, She forms imaginations, airy shapes, Which Reason, joining or disjoining, frames All what we affirm or what dewy, and call Our knowledge or opinion; then retires Into her private cell when nature rests. Oft, in her absence, mimic Fancy wakes To imitate her; but, misjoining shapes, Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams, Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. Some such resemblances I find Of our last evening’s talk in this thy dream, But with addition strange; Yet be not sad. Evil into the mind of God or man May come and go, so unapproved, and leave No spot or blame. (V, 100–119)

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If evil may leave Eve untainted while it remains ‘unapproved’ – occurring but not actively chosen – then myriad possibilities and intentions could run through any reader’s mind without meaning that Milton sacrifices the clarity of his presiding argument and purpose. The point offers an interesting gloss on the conflation of sinning and misreading that I made earlier. In Paradise Lost, polysemy and singularity are not intractable realities. So when Lucy Newlyn writes that the Romantics’ use of allusion is an ‘assimilation, reformulation and rejection of values embodied in Paradise Lost’ I am in agreement. But she also notes, and then ignores, the fact that such allusive techniques are ‘an aspect of intellectual history’. It is an intellectual history that is peculiar to the Romantic period and ensuing generations of readers operating with their legacy. It is, I believe, impossible with such knowledge to subscribe to the view that Milton also made use of allusion to achieve an indeterminacy that was ideological. Romantic habits of allusion, such as those of Keats that I analysed earlier, appear to be much less regulated than the operations of Renaissance poets. That is not to argue that Romantic writers were not alert to specific generic features of the sections of Paradise Lost to which they were attracted. One of the most graceful hymns of Paradise Lost is Adam and Eve’s morning orison of Book five (153–208). In a letter to Catherine Clarkson, Dorothy Wordsworth records the transporting effect of her brother reading the passage aloud: ‘William read part of the 5th Book of Paradise Lost to us. He read The Morning Hymn, while a stream of white vapour, which coursed the valley of Brathay, ascended slowly and by degrees melted away. It seemed as if we had never before felt deeply the power of the Poet’.85 Wordsworth’s reading of the passage from the hymn beginning ‘Ye mists and exhalations, that now rise/ From hill or streaming lake’ was either a happy coincidence or, more likely, his immediate surroundings recalled the passage to him providing an opportunity to revel in the synthesis of Nature and the written word. Either way, it is worth noting that Dorothy and William considered the passage in its full formal status as a hymn within the narrative. Yet it remains true that the primary difference between Milton and the Romantics was ideological. Ambiguity is not an ideological imperative of Milton’s – the effects of the imagination add a depth and resonance to Paradise Lost that does not detract from or replace its ethical drive. Against the Grain I have briefly run through the salient aesthetic and moral issues that frame the ensuing study of the Romantic legacy of Paradise Lost. The last function that this introduction serves is to introduce the particular vocabulary that I am going to use and my reasons for choosing it. The influence of Milton on Romantic writers is so   The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman, 2nd edn (2 vols, Oxford, 1969), p. 447. 85

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multi-faceted that some sort of shorthand helps to sharpen discussion and assures there will be no leaning on one particular area at the expense of another (such as the prominent attraction of Milton’s Satan). I have decided to borrow the title of an essay by Charles Lamb ‘Readers against the Grain’. For Lamb, when reading becomes an act undertaken for the sake of fashion, against the natural temperament of an individual, it cuts against the grain: ‘I behold springing up … a race of Readers against the grain. Young men who thirty years ago would have been playgoers, punch-drinkers, cricketers, etc’.86 I am not interested in dilettantism, but this phrase is attractive for a number of reasons. Firstly it will not limit the number of critical issues I can examine; whether these are formal, intertextual, part of tracing authorial intention or the establishment of Milton’s theological or political views. Secondly it frees me in part from the continual use of ‘misreading’, which carries Bloomian connotations that are not always my immediate concern. But most importantly the belief that Paradise Lost has an identifiable grain, or paraphrasable meaning, distinguishes what I am trying to argue from the arguments of Newlyn, Belsey and Davies. To read against such a grain emphasises that there is a gap between Renaissance and Romantic ideology and that a misreading has occurred. This may involve formal assassination, the ‘infinite regress’ of Abrams, or, as he elsewhere puts it ‘that radical mode of polysemism in which the latent personal significance of a narrative poem is found not merely to underlie, but to contradict and cancel the surface intention’.87 The distinction between reading ‘with’ and ‘against’ the grain is similar to that made between two characteristic positions, and two of the major figures, of English philosophy. J.S. Mill selects Coleridge and Bentham: By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it; the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually credible – has seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation of their experience.88

Mill’s comments are particularly interesting, seeing the distinction in my own terms, because his definition of reading with the grain leads naturally back to Abrams’ ‘infinite regress’: ‘a faithful interpretation of their experience’, a particularly Romantic subjectivity. By asserting the Coleridgean position reading 86   The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas (2 vols, London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 272. 87   M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York and Oxford, 1953), p. 251. 88   Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (33 vols, Toronto, 1969), vol. 10, p. 119.

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‘within’ authorial intent we are led back to a commentary on subjective experience of the text – the authenticity of individual perception, consistently privileged by Wordsworth and Coleridge, or the ‘phantom’ intentions to which Belsey and Davies alert us. I think it is useful to recognise that these categories will have a tendency to overlap. It is also true that if we read from ‘within’ some texts we will almost certainly misread them: it is dangerous to equate a poet’s life with his poem whilst not wanting to dismiss the relevance of that life entirely.

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Chapter 2

Milton in the Eighteenth Century

Errors, like Straws, upon the Surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below (Dryden, All For Love)

I. In 2006 a new study of Milton’s influence on contemporary ideology was published called Delirious Milton, written by Gordon Teskey. Teskey makes the claim that Milton continues to hold our interest because he stands in a unique position at the dawn of a new ‘modern’ understanding and appreciation of the creative artist or poet, whereby those who create do so as a challenge to an objective Creator ‘with a capital C’. According to Teskey, Milton looks both forwards and backwards like Janus, in one direction to medieval models of creativity in which tradition and authority provide legitimacy for a work of art, and in the other to the period of European Romanticism by which time the creative artist came to be viewed as a self-sufficient and self-defining entity in quest of a severance from tradition. In almost all the important matters that relate to Milton, the argument of the present book is situated at the opposite extreme from Teskey’s views. As regards the legacy or ‘reading history’ of Paradise Lost, however, he makes arguments that are a useful starting point for considering the significant place of pre-Romantic Miltonists in such a history. Reading against the grain of Paradise Lost was not a revolution entirely without precedent, and I would not want to suggest this to be the case. The nature of Milton’s critical reception in the Romantic period evolved, as did much of its poetic assumptions, from the work of earlier writers. Theories of the sublime, deriving ultimately from Longinus, but more immediately from Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, gave the Romantics a suitable vocabulary with which to describe the effects of Paradise Lost, particularly upon the imagination. Equally, significant rationalist thinkers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, provided a system of thought, deriving from the associationism of Locke and Hartley, which helped to vindicate some of the political arguments of Milton’s Satan. Milton’s biographers, Samuel Johnson and William Hayley, filled in the background of the man behind the poetry. These factors  10   Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 2.  10   Probably the best study of the poetic sublime is that of S.H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in 18th Century England (New York, 1935).

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and figures, combining with the continued movement of the eighteenth century away from a theocentric universe towards one foregrounding the priority of the individual, are the cultural backdrop for considering Romantic writing. As Jerome McGann puts it: ‘The Romantic tradition is principally a synthetic program whose centre has been shifted from rational inquiry to imaginative pursuit’. I am going to argue, however, that such a tradition was well under way before the end of the eighteenth century and the part of Paradise Lost in Romantic thought had already gone into rehearsals. Teskey places Milton at the dawn of Modernism and in doing so augurs a new rift in the text of Paradise Lost. It is a fundamental rift between poetry or language (implicating its modern corollary of polysemy or multiplicity that I have laid out in my introduction) and the theme or subject of Paradise Lost: ‘the more artistically brilliant is the poet’s justification of the ways of God to men, in particular, the account of Creation, the more the God he justifies, the Creator with a capital C, disappears behind the brilliance of the justification’. Teskey poaches Empsonian and Bloomian theory and sometimes even rhetoric to stymie the lover of Milton with a linguistic blockade. The logic of his argument is that if we admire the ‘brilliance’ of Milton’s poetry, we do so on the grounds that it comes at the expense of understanding his poem. Teskey’s afflatus entails that the stronger the feeling of admiration for Paradise Lost becomes, the further we will find ourselves from understanding Milton’s argument and praising God’s creations. Teskey would argue that the purpose of the poem indeed all truly ‘modern’ poetry is to defeat meaning. But what are we reading for if not to, at some level, verify a meaning that we can take away? Do readers only read to discover or rediscover themselves? Teskey engages with the drama of creation as an ongoing action in a distinctly modern manner, but the means, if not the ends, are perhaps surprisingly similar to those used by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke fulfils the criterion of being a lover of Milton, and in many ways he endorses Teskey’s arguments as regards reading poetry because he implicitly moves the focus of reading from the text as a completed artefact which contains meaning to the role of the reader as a participant in creating poetic effects. In A Philosophical Enquiry more than any other pre-Romantic document, we find the stated shift from rational enquiry to imaginative pursuit,  10   Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London, 1983), p. 10.  10   Milton’s critical reception between his death and the beginning of the Romantic period in Britain was so varied, and the literary, political or religious concerns so clearly drawn, that John T. Shawcross felt able to label responses to Milton thematically as well as chronologically as follows: ‘Period of Textual and Religious Criticism’ (1732–40); ‘Period of Alleged Plagiarism’, ‘Some Analysis, Praise, and Dispraise’ (1741–51); ‘Period of Defence and Analysis’ (1752–73); ‘Period of Praise and Some Detraction’ (1774–1801). See Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross (London, 1970), pp. vii–x.  10   Teskey, Delirious Milton, p. 27.

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or ambiguity, that McGann identifies with the later period of Romanticism. Burke, it should be noted, has very little to say on Milton’s purpose of justifying God’s ways to men, but this is not a direct component of his remit. In the ‘Introduction on Taste’ that prefaces A Philosophical Enquiry, Burke labours to separate two categories called the rational and the imaginative. These are familiar to any student of Romanticism as they anticipate an identical distinction to which Coleridge adheres in the Biographia Literaria: ‘The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature’. The imagination seeks out similarities and synthesis while the rational faculties separate and subdivide. In practice what this entails is that the sites of poetic interest lie, for Burke, in areas where distinctions are blurred and the notion of judgement is purposefully relegated to the margins. Burke places these separate mental facets in opposition: ‘So far as the imagination and the passions are concerned, I believe it is true, that the reason is little consulted’ and that ‘the judgement is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of reason’. Not only does Burke separate reason from imagination but also he places the latter in antagonism to the former. His vocabulary, particularly the emphasis on ‘enlarging stock’, underwrites an assertion, which reads not unlike Bloom, Davies or Teskey, of the power of the poet and the reader to recreate poetry through the imagination. The reader plays a vital and creative role in experiencing sublime poetry while the place of verifiable meaning and its upshot as regards Paradise Lost – Milton’s argument – is of only minor importance. To summarise the theoretical overview, Burke’s sublime foregrounds natural and poetic forces and images that excite pain and awe involving the reduction of the intellectual faculties. Unlike the Longinian or Kantian sublime, there is less recompense in the correspondent elevation of the subjective imagination: ‘we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated’. At the centre of Burke’s thinking lies Milton, and particularly the character of Satan (Burke gives his own reasons why Milton’s God is less important for him).10 The much-referenced description of Satan in Book one is offered by Burke as the zenith of sublime verse: He above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent,  10   Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford, 1990; repr. 1998), pp. 17–18. Hereafter BSB.  10   BSB, p. 25.  10   BSB, p. 24.  10   BSB, p. 63. 10   BSB, p. 64.

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Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. (PL, I, 589–99)

Burke defines why he believes the passage to be sublime: ‘The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud [sic] of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness, and join them and you infallibly lose the clearness’.11 The effect of the Burkean sublime is, then, something close to Keats’ Negative Capability in which the ‘mind is hurried out of itself’. From the tangle of imagery, anathema to Pound and Leavis, emerges a clarity that would otherwise be absent. Dramatically, Dryden advertises exactly this in the opening stage direction to his recasting of Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence (1677): ‘The first Scene represents a Chaos, or a confus’d Mass of Matter’, from which emerges clarity through the introduction of, typically Miltonic, ‘Warlike Music’.12 It should not pass unnoticed however that while Burke ignores any open discussion of moral purpose in poetry his language keeps returning to the conflation of ethics and aesthetics. In promoting pleasure as both the beginning and end of the reading experience, Burke invokes specifically Promethean and Satanic grandeur: ‘we know by experience, that for the enjoyment of pleasure, no great efforts of power are at all necessary; nay we know, that such efforts would go a great way towards destroying our satisfaction: for pleasure must be stolen, and not forced upon us; pleasure follows the will’.13 Burke’s pleasure must burn like Promethean   BSB, p. 57. See also T.S. Eliot: ‘We must, then, in reading Paradise Lost not expect to see clearly’, Milton (1947), in Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. James Thorpe (London, 1951; repr. 1965), p. 323. 12   The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (20 vols, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1994), vol. 12, p. 98. Dryden’s opinion on the martial music of Paradise Lost is markedly different from the music that Leavis associated with Milton. Possibly, in Miltonic terms, the difference lies between the Dorian and Lydian modes. Interestingly, it is also true that there was something of a vogue for presenting chaos, and invoking Milton, through music in the late eighteenth century. Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation (1798), opens with magnificent blurred sounds designed to represent chaos. It ‘was written to a text compiled from the 1st chapter of Genesis and the 7th and 8th books of Paradise Lost’, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford, 1985; repr. 1994), p. 443. 13   BSB, pp. 59–60. 11

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fire, it must be creative in an imaginative sense and only the sublime at its height can provide the vertigo of feeling simultaneous elevation and diminishment. The effects should also be immediate so that ‘strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together’.14 Again however, the most immediate literary touchstone for such a feeling of awakening from confusion into clarity is to be found in the opening book of Paradise Lost. When Satan drags himself from the burning marl in hell, the physical agony is reflected in the fractured logic of his first speeches, creating a sudden sublime onrush for both character and reader just as Burke describes. The return of Satan to consciousness is accompanied by the violent physical and mental surge of trying to recompose his mind to foreign surroundings, an unfamiliar frame, and newly acquired consequences for prior actions. He wakes to ‘Treble confusion’ with the greatest hangover of all time: Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, Confounded, though immortal: but his doom Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes, That witnessed huge affliction and dismay, Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate; At once, as far as angels ken, he views The dismal situation waste and wild. (PL, I, 50–60)

As Satan tries to sift the outcome of his actions, the narrator affirms the ongoing deluge of returning consciousness through his movement from past to present tense: ‘for now the thought’, ‘At once, as far as angels ken’. The fluid imagery of creation or novelty to be found throughout the opening hundred lines of Book one in which Milton moves from considering chaos, to the commencement of his epic, to the fiery liquid of Pandemonium is mimicked within the mind of Satan. The chaos of Satan’s thoughts follows the pattern of liquid construction in a manner that exactly tallies with Burke’s descriptions of the sublime. To pursue Burke’s methodical rendering of pleasure manifested in the sublime means, then, that the reader implicitly turns Satan himself into a character experiencing the sublime wrath of God. The next logical step would be the conflation of the reader and Milton’s Satan. Whether Burke achieves this by accident or design, the ramifications for the reading experience acquire a very modern flavour. The linguistic origin of Burke’s theory seems to further invite the aesthetic, and implicitly moral, conjoining of the reader and Satan in the poetic experience. In the subsection ‘Terror’, Burke defines his category of ‘astonishment’ and attempts to trace the classical precedents for his choice of the word: 14

 

BSB, p. 60.

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Vereor in latin, is what αίδέω is in greek. The Romans used the verb Stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus (thunderstruck) is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the French etonnement, and the english astonishment and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder?15

Of greatest etymological interest in relation to Paradise Lost is attonitus, which Burke translates as meaning ‘thunder-struck’. The figure to take the brunt of the thundering orchestrated by God within the text of Paradise Lost is naturally Milton’s Satan. Although Burke does not state it, the word ‘attonitus,’ whilst equally recalling the thunder of Jove, merits allusion to Paradise Lost. One of the recurring gripes of the fallen angels is the noise and violence that accompanied their ejection from Heaven. Thunder is the first characteristic of God and the first of His divine effects that Satan recalls: ‘so much the stronger proved/ He with his thunder’ (I, 92–3). The occasion of their vanquishing is also remembered as an electric storm: ‘The fiery surge that from the precipice/ Of heaven received us falling; and the thunder,/ Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,/ Perhaps has spent his shafts and ceases now/ To bellow through the vast and soundless deep’ (I, 173–7). It is primarily the noise of God’s thunder that torments the rebel crew and provides their most abiding memory. God’s power is manifested sonically and leaves the devils with a ringing in their ears. Indeed when Satan repeats the characteristic mistake of the Miltonic villain that I explored in my introduction, i.e., to suppose that God’s omnipotence can be sectioned off and dealt with in discrete portions, he selects thunder: ‘What matter where if I be still the same,/ And what I should be, all, but less than he/ Whom thunder hath made greater? (I, 256–8)’ It is significant on a number of levels that Milton’s Satan describes God as though He were Jove. It is certainly Satan’s intention to, as always, reduce the extent of God’s proven power to theatrical embellishments (an irony lost on Satan in his own use of gunpowder and explosives). It is also true that Satan entertains the notion that God really is more powerful only by dint of his use of thunder (whether he believes his spin or not is of course the crux of Empson’s reading of the character). Most importantly for my argument, however, it is Satan who is literally in a state of attonitus. Milton’s Satan is the most thunderstruck of all characters and so for Burke he not only provides a source of, but also undergoes the affects of, the Miltonic sublime. The inescapable conclusion for a reader of A Philosophical Enquiry is that Milton’s Satan and the reader share common interests. As I stated in my introduction, no aesthetic decision is undertaken in Paradise Lost that does not simultaneously impact on the moral. In reading Burke’s work, just as in reading Teskey’s, one gets the feeling that the meaning of Paradise Lost is obscured by its own poetical medium, but that this is also the point of the poem. In some senses, 15

 

BSB, p. 54.

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the meaning of Paradise Lost resides purely in art, in the aesthetic or imagistic. As Burke explains, the pleasurable sensation of encountering art may be attached to joy or grief. Each emotion if raised to an intense pitch can give pleasure to the reader of poetry: It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness; to go back to every particular enjoyment, to dwell upon each, and to find a thousand new perfections in all, that were not sufficiently understood before; in grief, the pleasure is still uppermost.16

In another vocabulary the rhapsody of Burke as a reader of poetry is not far removed from the poet Wordsworth, who continually finds succour in ‘spots’ of remembered time, or the Keats of Ode on Melancholy, who has learnt to feed deeply on the ‘peerless eyes’ of his mistress ‘when the melancholy fit shall fall’. Scenes of grief, like scenes of joy, provide not instruction so much as experienced or remembered pleasure given value by dint of their intensity. Emerson is perhaps the writer who has seen the issue most clearly: ‘The ingenuity of man has been dedicated always to the solution of one problem, – how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end’.17 But Emerson sees the separation of the moral and the aesthetic as a philosophical problem requiring the figurative precision of a surgeon. Burke views it as simply a fact of reading that can be acquired ‘by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise’.18 The danger of Burke’s sublime manifesto is that the reader leaves Paradise Lost a ‘bottomless’ poem. To put it another way, the centre of interest or reading paradigm that I have argued can become unsettled, is replaced by an aesthetic programme that Paradise Lost may contain but in which its meaning does not wholly reside. Emerson describes the problem as follows: ‘We can no more halve things, and get the sensual good by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow’.19 But Burke’s assessment of pleasure promotes a much-reordered centre of attention: The mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner,   BSB, pp. 34–5.   ‘Compensation’, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, 1983), p. 290. 18   BSB, p. 25. 19   ‘Compensation’, Emerson, ed. Porte, p. 291. 16 17

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and according to a different order. This power is called Imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention and the like.20

Here we have the first manifesto articulating the ubiquitous Romantic imagination. Its familiar inclusiveness is expressed in Burke’s substitution of imagination’s near-neighbours: wit, fancy and invention. The key word for my argument is ‘order’. For me, in Burke’s use of the word, two senses of ‘order’ are intentionally operable. The first relates to linearity or succession, the distinguishing factor of epic and narrative verse. The second indicates an entirely new mind-set, one which does not just randomly disorder and then reassemble the parts of poetry for personal consumption but instead dissects verse according to a new order of logic. What Burke heralds is no less than a revolution in poetry and its purposes that anticipates Romanticism and places the sublime armoury of Miltonic/Satanic imagery, pleasurable terror and magnificent auditory effects, at its centre. I believe it is in the light of aesthetic theory that conceals a moral freight that the emergent cult of the Miltonic sublime should be considered. And there can be no question that this is truly a Miltonic sublime – Paradise Lost becomes practically synonymous with theories of the sublime in the mid-eighteenth century. Milton’s capacity to align clarity with confusion and engage the imagination became in the period the measure of successful verse. An aloof and ambiguous Milton was a profound Milton, as Burke comments ‘A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea’ and ‘obscurity is the necessary attendant upon prophecy’.21 As far as reading Paradise Lost is concerned, Lucy Newlyn explains that the implication of Burke’s theory is that ‘parts of the future must inevitably be repressed or withheld from the reader’.22 Such a statement, emphasising the deferral of meaning that comes with fragments of understanding, seems unusual when it is remembered that in fact the whole future of mankind is made internal to the narrative via Gabriel’s foretelling for Adam. Newlyn’s ‘parts of the future’ can then only be considered formally as meaning other parts of the text which opens up the space where I have suggested Romantic readings will replace the whole with the part or attempt to provide a reading other than the one transparently available. It is in this space, through the perceived obscurity of Paradise Lost, that a situation is promoted where that phrase ‘reading against the grain’ begins to emerge as an operative dominant factor. The Burkean sublime represses the significance of the narrative of the Fall while on a local level it also suggests a gap ‘between the power and grandeur of ideas and the insufficiency of language to express them.’23 Rather than being established, meaning is instead intimated or deferred as in a Romantic Fragment Poem. It seems that a pre-Romantic ideology, seeing the phenomenon in McGann’s terms, began to attach itself to Milton in the eighteenth 20

    22   23   21

BSB, p. 16. BSB, p. 58. Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), p. 52. Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 50.

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century, largely through the fact that theories of the sublime authorised verbal and formal imprecision. The result of this is, of course, potentially damaging to the integrity of the meaning of Paradise Lost. Newlyn’s view that eighteenthcentury commentators had come to see Milton as divorced from his own epic, as transcending or literally lying outside his own poem is insightful, and this would undoubtedly result in what seems to me a peculiar reading experience. But then again, Newlyn’s point is quite similar to Burke’s belief that ‘hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity’.24 Milton is ‘removed from the purely textual realm, and seen in terms of an elemental power’.25 The paradoxical ramification for reading Paradise Lost is that Milton’s reputation, founded as it is upon the merits of his greatest poem, becomes a threat to our understanding of that very poem. As Teskey puts it, ‘[Milton] made the real subject of Paradise Lost the excitement of an epic being made.’26 Poetic ‘affects’ replace poetic ‘effects’, something that a close reader of Burke will find familiar. Indeed Burke seldom seems to distinguish between poetry as it ‘affects’ (influences, alters, engages) the imagination and the normative sense in which narrative verse concerns itself with ‘effects’ (outcomes, upshots, consequences): The images raised by poetry are always of this obscure kind; though in general the effects of poetry, are by no means to be attributed to the images it raises … But painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents; and even in painting a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effects of the picture.27 [italics added]

In my opinion, Burke is interested only in poetic affectiveness here. Effects would necessitate some moral reference that only emerges implicitly. It would not be going too far to argue that the eighteenth-century Milton is primarily an affective Milton whose verse makes an immediate impression through its capacity to raise the imagination to lofty heights. In discussing the sublime in the eighteenth century, it would of course be wrong to focus solely on Burke. He turned extant ideas into a brand that will forever be attached to his name, but the relationship between Milton and the poetic sublime had been established well in advance of 1757, as early in fact as the late seventeenth century. In 1698, John Toland writes: As to the regularity of the Poem, I never knew it question’d by any but such as would build themselves a Reputation on the flaws and mistakes in other Men’s Labors. But the unparallel’d Sublimity and Force of the Expression, with the   BSB, p. 58.   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 60. 26   Teskey, Delirious Milton, p. 29. 27   BSB, pp. 57–8. 24 25

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delicacy of his Thoughts, and the copiousness of his Invention, are unanimously own’d by all ranks of Writers.28

Toland foregrounds both the sublimity and force of Milton’s poetry, along with what could almost amount to a Burkean definition of the ‘beautiful’ – ‘the delicacy of the Thoughts’. Joseph Addison was another to eulogise in similar terms: ‘[Milton] has carried our Language to a greater height than any of the English poets have ever done before or after him, and made the Sublimity of his stile [sic] equal to that of his Sentiments’.29 John Dennis comments that ‘[Milton] without the assistance of Rhime, is one of the most sublime of English poets. Nay there is something so transcendently sublime in his first, second, and sixth Books, that were the Language as pure as the Images are vast and daring’.30 I will have more to say on the issue of rhyme shortly, but the question that first occurs is whether this earlier association of Milton with the sublime is equivalent to Burke’s theories? Dennis is worth mentioning because he is acknowledged to be the first, if not the foremost, critic to ‘investigate the nature of the sublime object and its effect on the mind of the reader’.31 But one significant difference is that Dennis makes no division between the poet’s conceptions and his realisation, as Burke and, more famously, Shelley did. Dennis seems to locate the Miltonic sublime exclusively in the language and imagery of Paradise Lost and places no stress on the ideas and imagination, which lie either with the poet or the reader. At the same time, Dennis selects Books one, two and six for specific attention; undoubtedly due to the presence of Milton’s Satan. The connection between Satan and the sublime is borne out in Dennis’ correspondence; he specifically remarks ‘I cited at large the sublime Description of Satan in the first Book of that Poem; and the Speech of that fallen Arch-Angel in the fourth, which begins with that noble Apostrophe to the sun’.32 The practice and conclusions of Dennis are probably similar then to Burke’s. My belief is supported by the fact that, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Dennis argues that ‘the Devil is properly [Milton’s] Hero, because he [gets] the better’.33 The only way in which Satan gets the better over any character is in terms of grandeur of poetic composition or sublime imagery. While Dennis would seem to anticipate Burke in connecting the Miltonic sublime specifically with Satan, he also highlights that other Romantic bugbear that will raise its head in ensuing chapters: originality. The primary effect of Milton’s sublime is rather Kantian than Burkean in this case, prompting and not   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 120.   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 161. 30   Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. Thorpe, p. 344. 31   Taken from J.T. Boulton’s introduction to Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1958), p. xlviii. 32   Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. Thorpe, p. 347. 33   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 129. 28 29

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thwarting the imagination: ‘the choice of Milton’s Subject … set him free from the Obligation which he lay under to the new Poetical Laws, so it necessarily threw him upon new Thoughts, new Images, and an original Spirit’.34 Not only is Milton’s language part of his sublime quality, but his very subject sets him apart and explains his originality.35 Dennis styles Milton not only as a poetic craftsman par excellence but also as an advanced philosopher who had imagined further than other men into fresh imagistic territory. The primary quality of Milton’s verse is again considered to be its imaginative strength, its ability to ‘stir up emotion in the mind of the reader’. Addison, who, through his series of papers for the Spectator, did more than anyone to establish the sublime reputation of Milton, agrees with Dennis on this point: ‘It is impossible for the imagination of man to distend itself with greater ideas, than those which he has laid together in his first, second, and sixth books’.36 Addison, it seems, must also have equated the Miltonic sublime with the character of Satan, or at least with the descriptions of Pandemonium. But Addison, for one, does not cast Satan as hero: ‘The Paradise Lost is an epic, or a narrative poem, and he that looks for a hero in it, searches for that which Milton never intended; but if he will needs fix the name of an hero upon any person in it, it is certainly the Messiah who is the hero, both in the principal action, and in the chief episodes’.37 I would argue that the importance of these comments by Addison are that they suggest the poetic, or sublime, strengths of the poem are not identical with Milton’s purpose, indeed with his meaning or argument, which centres, for Addison, on Christ. It therefore would be wrong to relate pre-Romantic views of Milton’s Satan idly with the sublime. An association was clearly recognised by most critics, but the artistic affirmation of Satan was checked by the moral purpose or argument of Paradise Lost. Addison recognised the difference. II Satan was clearly synonymous with the sublime qualities of Milton’s imagery, but whether pre-Romantic commentators on Paradise Lost ever viewed Satan as a genuine hero or even as an interrogation of the deficiency of classical heroic values   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 129.   Lucy Newlyn argues that Milton’s originality was not straightforward: ‘[Milton] provided a model of originality thriving on imitation Romantic genius emerging out of neo-classicism. He could therefore be used as an “illustrious example”, on both sides of the originality debate’, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 48. For Newlyn’s full discussion of the Romantic view of Milton’s claims to originality see pp. 40–49. 36   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 156. Between 5 January and 3 May 1712, Addison produced six general papers on Paradise Lost and 12 papers on the individual books. 37   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p.166. 34 35

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as Barbara Lewalski suggests is a debatable point. C.S. Lewis once felt the need to provide two definitions of the word ‘Magnificence’ to apply to Paradise Lost: the first was that the poem, as an ‘architectonic’ whole, was itself a magnificent creation; the second that Satan, or a real being approximating to the character, is, or ought to be, an object of admiration. Lewis famously commented that ‘The first, as far as I know, has never till modern times been denied; the second never affirmed before the times of Blake and Shelley for when Dryden said that Satan was Milton’s ‘hero’ he meant something quite different’.38 I have always found the precise implications of Lewis’ statement hard to unpick, but I will try to do so now in relation to Dryden who gives us perhaps the best hope of understanding the immediate response of the Restoration to Paradise Lost and to Satan. Do we find in Dryden’s views any embryonic features of Romantic misreading or aesthetic values akin to those of Burke? Dryden’s opinion of Paradise Lost is at first difficult to trace but in his Epigram on Milton (1688), he suggests that by the end of the seventeenth century Milton was already considered to be chief among epic poets, greater even than Homer and Virgil: Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third, she join’d the former two.39

The allusions that Dryden makes to Paradise Lost in his brief heroic epic on the fallout of the Popish Plot, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), provide a more specific reading. The poem is a celebration of kingship, particularly the kingship of Charles II, and the narrative follows a thinly veiled recasting of the machinations of Shaftesbury and Titus Oates amongst others to sow suspicion of a Catholic conspiracy and then bring down the throne. The villain of the piece, Achitophel or Shaftesbury, is a figurative blend of the Miltonic figures of Satan and his ghastly offspring Sin. He is introduced with a rhetorical glance at the procession of fallen angels in Book one of Paradise Lost: ‘Of these the false Achitophel was first;/ A name to all succeeding ages cursed:/ For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;/ Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit’ (I, 150–153). A blend of Satanic and Sinful lexes are then used to recount the actions and characters of both Absalom and Achitophel: ‘Got, while his soul did huddled notions try;/ And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy./ In friendship false, implacable in hate,/ Resolved to ruin or to rule the state’ (I, 171–4). Yet while Achitophel’s is ‘A name to all succeeding ages   C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, Oxford, and New York, 1942; repr. 1971), p. 94. 39   Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. Thorpe, p. 337. 38

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cursed’, unlike Milton’s Satan, his danger lies ‘unfixed in principles or place’ (I, 154) [italics added]. It is Achitophel’s opportunism which allows him to exploit the otherwise devoted Absalom – ‘The wished occasion of the Plot he takes;/ Some circumstances finds, but more he makes’ (I, 208–9) – and actually recreate the Satanic grievance at Christ’s election to the right hand of God by harping on the theme of ‘arbitrary counsels’ (I, 212) and ‘arbitrary laws’ (I, 701). Absalom is subsequently tempted to view his brief in the plot as the inheritor of Satan’s complaint from Paradise Lost Book five: ‘How happy he had been, if destiny/ Had higher placed his birth, or not so high’ (I, 481–2). The image of a composite devil in the text is completed when Achitophel figuratively turns King David into the falling Satan as well: ‘like the Prince of Angels, from his height/ Comes tumbling downward with diminished light’ (I, 273–4). References to Paradise Lost proliferate as Dryden gives a Miltonic ‘flavour’ to his verse (just as I have described Milton using Virgilian flavouring), although this has not stopped A.B. Chambers discovering ‘a carefully controlled system of allusion’ that even ‘provides an ironic Christhood for Absalom’ due to the similarity between Dryden’s temptation scenes and those of Paradise Regained Book three (21–5).40 It is not necessary to be quite so explicit to understand that, despite Satan’s being a transferable and ‘unfixed’ rhetoric in Dryden’s hands, there can be no ambiguity as to the poet’s views on revolution, which anticipate the Toryism of Burke: ‘To change foundations, cast the frame anew,/ Is work for rebels, who base ends pursue,/ At once divine and human laws control,/ And mend the parts by ruin of the whole’ (I, 805–8). It is interesting to note that Dryden views the revolutionary work of Achitophel/Shaftesbury as politically shortsighted because one part of the constitution (the monarchy) takes on a disproportionate significance in the eyes of the zealous Whig reformers. Yet, if Dryden takes the narrative of the war in heaven as a testing ground to emphasise that good kingship must be legitimised by divinely legislated primogeniture, it should not be thought that there is a straightforward political transference between Absalom and Achitophel and Paradise Lost or that Dryden writes a poem venerating Milton. Rather it appears that Dryden was not only engaging in a response to the immediate political crisis of the Popish plot but also participating in an ongoing formal dialogue with Paradise Lost and beginning to shape its legacy. Sharon Achinstein has argued that in the 1670s, ‘Milton’s name was still a ready weapon in the debates over religious tolerance’41 and that throughout the Restoration Milton ‘was synonymous with rebellion, the author and his books evoking among Anglican royalists a shrill memory of all the fury and chaos of the previous twenty years’.42 Achinstein goes on to note that the continuing association 40   A.B. Chambers, ‘Absalom and Achitophel: Christ and Satan’, MLN, 74/7 (Nov., 1959), 593, 592–6. 41   Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden and Literary Enthusiasm’, HLQ, 59/1 (1996): 1–2, 1–29. 42   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 2.

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of Milton with republicanism, or more properly the tradition of dissent, in the 1670s and ’80s was due not so much to the revolutionary content of Paradise Lost as to the revolutionary implications of its form. We have already witnessed Augustan commentators such as John Dennis praise Milton’s blank verse because it ‘set him free from the Obligation which he lay under to the new Poetical Laws’ (presumably including the vogue for rhyme). But the response of writers such as Marvell and Dryden to Milton’s choice of blank verse reveals that during the Restoration some of the issues surrounding the ambiguous nature of Milton’s ‘Burkean’ sublime, and therefore reading against the grain, were also already in play. The consequences were, however, vastly different. When Marvell composed his verse introduction to Paradise Lost for the 1674 edition for instance he lavished noteworthy praise on Milton’s decision to reject rhyme in favour of blank verse: Well might thou scorn thy readers to allure With tinkling rhyme, of thy own sense secure; While the Town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, And, like a pack-horse, tires without bells. Their fancies like our bushy points appear, The poets tag them, we for fashion wear. I too transported by the mode offend, And while I meant to praise thee must commend. Thy verse created like thy theme sublime, In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme. (49–54)43

Marvell’s eulogy attacks the ‘tinkling’ rhyme of Dryden reprised in his Bayes persona from Buckingham’s The Rehearsal but intriguingly associates rhyme with clear meaning, what he here terms ‘sense secure’. Of equal note is Marvell’s choice of language when he remarks ‘Their fancies like our bushy points appear;/ The poets tag them, we for fashion wear’. He figuratively links rhyme with the fashion of sporting facial hair – ‘bushy points’ – and describes the use of endrhyme as ‘tagging’, meant here in the sense of curtailment rather than addition. The verbal reminiscence of Dryden’s well-known visit to Milton in 1671 whilst contemplating producing Paradise Lost on the stage should not be overlooked. Morris Freedman cautions that some of the accounts of the meeting may contain apocryphal material but argues that there is more than enough evidence to suggest that the issue of Dryden using rhyme for the planned The State of Innocence was on the agenda.44 John Aubrey first mentioned the issue of rhyming or ‘tagging’ in 1681 ‘Mr. Milton received [Dryden] civilly, & told him he would give him leave to 43

184.

 

The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Longman, 2003), p.

  Morris Freedman, ‘Dryden’s “Memorable Visit” to Milton’, HLQ, 18/2 (Feb., 1955): 99–108. 44

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tagge his verses’. But a later account from 1713 reinforces the belief that Marvell may have been aware of the substance of the meeting when he wrote the verse Preface to Paradise Lost. Not only is tagging mentioned, but also ‘points’: We shall here beg the Reader’s pardon for mentioning a Passage told a Gentleman of our society almost Forty years since by Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Waller in company to visit Mr. Milton and desire his Leave for putting his Paradise Lost into Rhyme for the stage. Well, Mr. Dryden, says Milton, it seems you have a mind to Tagg my points, and you have my leave to Tagg ’em, but some of ’em are so Awkward and Old Fashion’d that I think you had as good leave ’em as you found ’em.45

If Milton suggested to Dryden that his own points (possibly applying in this case to music as well)46 had become old fashioned but were better left that way then it seems too much of a coincidence that Marvell would use the words tag and points in close proximity and adapt the context to another mode of fashion: the wearing of beards. But why would Marvell want to distance Milton from the ‘sense secure’ that seemingly accompanied Dryden’s heroic couplets? And what exactly did Dennis mean by the ‘Obligation’ of writing in a rhymed form that Milton had shunned in Paradise Lost? The two questions can be answered together because Dennis’s ‘Obligation’ meant something approaching ‘clarity of sense’ and the avoidance of ambiguity to which Marvell alerts us. Achinstein agues that Milton’s use of blank verse was, for Marvell at least, indicative of a covert tradition of dissent in a period of increasing censorship whereby many books including Paradise Lost were publicly burnt: ‘Milton was not associated with a dissenting tradition strictly because of his ideas; rather, he represented … literary enthusiasm, a powerful force that embodied the most dangerous aspects of revolutionary energy: the conviction that ones ideas were divinely inspired and the belief that individual choice and experience could guide moral actions’.47 It would appear to be difficult to throw out all of Milton’s republican ‘ideas’ for the sake of the blank verse form and additionally his central involvement in Cromwell’s Republic, but if Achinstein is correct then it proves that a brand of ambiguity was associated with the ‘literary enthusiasm’ of Paradise Lost as early as the 1670s. The rejection of rhyme also implicitly allies Milton with the character of Satan: ‘The enemies of enthusiasm claimed that this mode was dangerous not only because of its rhetorical power – its encoding of subversive political opinion in ambiguous or dense language – but also, and more importantly, because those who used it made unverifiable claims for their own private authority. Enthusiasm, it was feared, could spiral out   The Monitor, I/17, in R.D. Havens, ‘Mr. Dryden meets Mr. Milton’, Weekly Review, 1 (June, 1919): 110. 46   OED, 3. Music, a, ‘A short strain or snatch of melody; a musical phrase’. 47   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 8. 45

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of control and thus lead to rebellion and anarchy’.48 Nonetheless, rhyme became for libertarians like Marvell ‘an artificial or satanic circumscription’ while ‘God alone’ had ‘the power and the authority to put boundaries around, or to number, things’.49 Dryden characteristically felt otherwise and in the Preface to The State of Innocence censured Milton for the ‘liberty’ taken through the use of blank verse. While he may not have been one of the ‘Anglican propagandists’ who ‘attacked nonconformists by imputing to them a vulgar style’,50 there is little question that he felt the need to produce a more civil and pared down version of Paradise Lost when writing The State of Innocence, as I will argue below. Unintelligibility and unnecessary verbosity in Milton’s verse style was made to seem a threat to public religious worship by Anglican Tories: ‘Milton’s poetic imagination was thus linked to dangerous religious enthusiasm, not solely for its blank verse, but also for one of its prime literary methods, inspired poetry: what might later be called the sublime’.51 Reading forward to theories of the sublime in the mid-seventeenth century, Achinstein may well make the leap too easily between absence of rhyme and ‘private inspiration’ (because blank verse was naturally rejected by the ‘polished’ neoclassical Dryden), but it could be argued that there is indeed a process of smoothing out the rough edges of Paradise Lost in Dryden’s rendering of The State of Innocence and that ‘Milton is the natural ore that Dryden mines and refines’ [italics added].52 What Achinstein proposes is certainly significant for the place of ambiguity in the reception history of Paradise Lost. For one thing, her focus on style as ideological in itself – at least as Marvell and Dryden impute it to the poem – opens up the possibility that ‘obscurity does not always call for a search for an esoteric inner meaning’.53 In other words polysemy or verbal indeterminacy does not necessitate competitive and irresolvable meanings in a text. Achinstein’s model draws on, but also serves as a corrective to, Annabel Patterson’s study of censorship in the Restoration and her belief that a coded form of language had developed in the seventeenth century that demanded readers have the skill to ‘read between the lines’ and infer submerged political intentions in a text. Patterson argues that Renaissance censorship created an ‘oblique discourse’54: ‘For what we find everywhere apparent and widely understood, from the middle of the sixteenth century in England, is a system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural

48

  Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 8.   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, pp. 5–6. 50   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 13. 51   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 16. 52   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 13. 53   Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration’, p. 7. 54   Annabel Patterson, Censorship and interpretation: the conditions of writing and reading in early modern England (Madison, 1984), p. 15. 49

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force of considerable consequence’.55 As Christopher Hill also suggests, writers in the Renaissance and Restoration were able to avoid censorship by encoding their work through ambiguity; for Milton this meant that ‘his analysis of the failure of the Revolution [in Paradise Lost] could not be direct’.56 Even so, it is vital to separate ambiguity, polysemy or obliqueness in verbal method from ambiguous authorial intention; only then will Paradise Lost stand free from the post-Romantic insistence of Newlyn, Belsey and Davies on ideological ambiguity. This being the case, Annabel Patterson’s arguments should not be wholly dismissed either. While she argues that ‘encoding did take place’, Patterson offers a useful new category to describe Renaissance and Restoration habits of literary indeterminacy: ‘functional ambiguity’.57 In doing so, she takes into account the place of reception history in the verification of meaning ‘in which the indeterminacy inveterate to language was fully known and knowingly exploited by authors and readers alike’.58 Amounting to a conscious and authorially licensed misreading that does not negate the primary organising imperative, Patterson’s functional ambiguity supposes that a poem such as Sidney’s Arcadia ‘was constantly rewritten by later readers (as well as by Sidney himself) in the light of their own historical circumstances and ideological needs’.59 It is hard not to agree that if we ignore the social and aesthetic functions of pre-Romantic ambiguity then we will miss the debate in which writers like Sidney and Milton engage. A good example that Patterson selects is the moment when Philisides finishes his marriage song in the Third Eclogues of Arcadia. The song is a beast fable in which the animals appeal to Jove for a new king but he warns them that monarchy always leads to tyranny. The result is the creation of man who indeed becomes a ruler and tyrant and ‘foments hostility between the great wild beasts and lesser animals, driving the former into exile and then preying himself on the meeker animals left without protection’.60 Patterson argues that the immediate reception history of the passage opened up various readings: ‘The fable has been read as an incitement to rebellion, in the line of Huguenot pamphlets like Vindiciae contra Tyrannos; as an expression of orthodox Tudor absolutism designed to ingratiate Sidney with the queen; as an assertion of the importance of a powerful aristocracy in maintaining the balance of power; and as a Calvanist allegory of the fall of man’.61 The tale is broad enough to hold each of these readings as it is a type of allegory but Patterson argues that it is also an allegory of its own creation and a

  Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, pp. 10–11.   Christopher Hill, ‘Censorship and English Literature’, in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (3 vols, Arnherst, Mass., 1985), vol. 1, p. 51. 57   Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 18. 58   Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 18. 59   Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 18. 60   Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 37. 61   Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 38. 55

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debate ‘about equivocation in the interests of safety’.62 Sidney felt he could not speak openly about monarchy and so covers his back by providing two conclusions to the song: one is a warning to man not to glory in tyranny, the other a warning to the beasts not to accept it. Patterson concludes that the hedging of bets is therefore not actually ambiguous at all: ‘by pointing out the need for ambiguity, in a system where noone may “freely speak” except the ruler, Sidney, in effect, makes plain his desire for reform’.63 This is an example of reading between the lines to find a submerged political intention presented formally as ambiguity. The significance of Sidney’s ambivalent rendering of an allegory of kingship to Paradise Lost becomes apparent in the response of the Arcadians to Philisides’ song. As Patterson points out, they become the kind of critics and interpreters of meaning that dominate late twentieth-century literary study: According to the nature of diverse ears, diverse judgements straight followed: Some praising his voice; others the words, fit to frame a pastoral style; others the strangeness of the tale, and scanning what he should mean by it.64

Patterson comments that ‘everything in this passage dramatizes the problems of reception and interpretation that we, three hundred years later, continue to wrestle with’.65 It seems unlikely that the response of the Arcadians to a song presenting the abuses of kingship is not being alluded to when Milton describes the creation of a new tyrannous monarchy in Pandemonium: The hasty multitude Admiring entered; and the work some praise, And some the architect: his hand was known In heaven by many a towered structure high, Where sceptered angels held their residence, And sat as princes, whom the supreme king Exalted to such power, and gave to rule, Each in his hierarchy the orders bright. (PL, 730–737)

In a condensed form, Milton’s allusion to Arcadia can be read as an encoded or ‘ambiguous’ commentary on two models of kingly authority: the one divine, the other infernal. Through verbal similitude, Milton likens the fallen angels who appreciate the architecture of Satan’s damned kingdom to the undecided Arcadians who cannot determine the meaning of Philisides’ fable. They praise the work or the architect (a metaphor perhaps for subsequent readers of Paradise Lost) but are notably ‘hasty’ in their judgements and too eager to offer veneration. 62

    64   65   63

Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 39. Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 39. Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 39. Patterson, Censorship and interpretation, p. 39.

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Far from promoting the artist above God, as Teskey would claim, Milton orders the allusion to Arcadia to demonstrate firstly the flawed political judgement of the fallen angels who, like Philisides’ beasts, chose to follow a new tyrannous king, and secondly the unsophisticated aesthetic judgment that recalls the Arcadian audience. The allusion suggests that Milton could employ functional ambiguity to make a political point about reading, far removed from the use of polysemy in order to confound stable interpretation. III As I have argued, there is evidence that Dryden’s use of heroic rhyme had a political resonance, and The State of Innocence is particularly interesting because of the way he cramps Milton’s enjambed and Latinate expressions into curt couplets. But it is the form of drama as a whole which should concern us now because it perhaps points more clearly towards the type of misreading of Paradise Lost that we will find in Romantic verse and that I have suggested is dominated by the conflation of parts and wholes. There is little to be found immediately in The State of Innocence to suggest that Dryden considered Milton’s Satan to be the hero of Paradise Lost as Lewis suggests. There are also few moments that one would consider to be ‘sublime’ in Burke’s sense. The dramatic sublime is not perhaps what one would expect from a neo-classicist in any case. Dryden recasts Milton’s Satan as Lucifer and begins his ‘Opera’ in Pandemonium, but as his title suggests, the focus of the drama is primarily upon Eden and the moment of the Fall. The scenes in Pandemonium are dealt with cursorily at best, and unlike Paradise Lost, Lucifer emerges as the villain of the piece fairly rapidly: ‘I have already gone too far to stop,/ And must push on my dire revenge, in ruin/ Of this gay frame, and Man, my upstart rival;/ In scorn of me created’ (II, ii, 8–11).66 As a reading, albeit poetic, of Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence therefore marginalises the importance of Satan/Lucifer. Part of the lessening of Satan’s magnitude results from the necessary difference between epic and dramatic forms, as Karl Kroeber writes: ‘Of necessity a play is concerned with a dramatic situation’. Narrative or epic is concerned, rather, with presenting progression and causality: ‘the outstanding characteristic of [narrative poetry], when it is contrasted to lyric or dramatic verse, is its movement, its flow in time’.67 Kroeber allows, though, that these definitions may not always function: ‘There may be, as Shakespeare proves, plenty of movement within a dramatic situation’.68 As far as Dryden’s play is concerned, Kroeber’s initial distinctions apply rather well. The State of Innocence 66   The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (20 vols, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994), vol. 12, pp. 98–146. 67   Karl Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1966), p. 6. 68   Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art, p. 196.

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is not really a progressive work, although it moves forward in time almost too swiftly and easily for any character development. The government of the story, though, is provided by one specific situation which is the Fall, or more particularly the precise moment at which Eve tastes the apple, ‘’Tis done; I’ll venture all and disobey’ (IV, ii, 137). But, does the government of dramatic interest also hinge on this moment? I think an answer to this question will help us to decide on the importance of Milton’s Satan to Dryden, and also whether the poet reads with or against the grain of Paradise Lost. As a dramatic piece, any adaptation of Paradise Lost cannot be concerned with building expectation – the reader is wholly aware that Adam and Eve will Fall before beginning the story and that Lucifer will be the agent of temptation. Most of Dryden’s dramatic weight falls instead on establishing responsibility, and it is here that the mood of the piece is fully expressed. The answers that Dryden offers as to who has responsibility for the Fall are fairly clear cut and would appear to show the poet closely following Milton’s intent. The immediacy of the drama provides a sense that Dryden is smoothing out the rough edges, not only of the blank verse style, as Achinstein suggests, but also of the question of responsibility found in Paradise Lost. On the surface at least, through the mouthpiece of his own versions of Gabriel and Raphael, Dryden reinforces Milton’s insistence on man’s free will: Gabriel. Heav’n may permit, but not ill consent; For hind’ring ill, he would all choice prevent. ’Twere to unmake, to take away thy will. Adam. Better constrain’d to good, than free to ill. Raphael. But what reward or punishment could be If man to neither good nor ill were free? Th’Eternal justice could decree no pain To him whose sins it self did first ordain; And good compell’d, could no reward exact: His pow’r would shine in goodness, not thy act. (IV, i, 101–10)

Dryden’s angels follow Milton’s to the letter. The dogmatic core of both texts is the same. Other actions are factored in, noticeably the uxoriousness of Adam: ‘Imprudence was your fault, but love is mine’ (V, ii, 70). Equally: ‘One look of hers my resolution breaks;/ Reason it self turns folly when she speaks:/ And awed by her whom it was meant to sway,/ Flatters her pow’r and does its own betray’ (IV, i, 201–4). Lucifer/Satan, naturally, has his own part to play, but is often too obviously hamming the Pantomime villain: ‘Methinks the beauties of this place should mourn;/ Th’immortal fruits, and Flow’rs at my return/ Should hang their wither’d heads; for sure my breath/ Is now more poys’nous, and has gather’d death’ (IV, ii, 1–4). More than any figure, though, it is Dryden’s Eve who emerges as scathed. Eve’s manipulation of Adam features strongly, as does her vanity. Significantly,

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she is first introduced in the Narcissus scene borrowed directly from Paradise Lost. Even before gazing into the pool, she exclaims like Cleopatra, ‘Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,/ And cannot: I myself am proud of me’ (II, iii, 14–15). Dryden is not willing to let the point rest there, and later, in conversation with Adam, the failing in Eve is again emphasised: ‘Thou more of pleasure may’st with me partake;/ I, more of pride, because thy bliss I make’ (III, i, 29–30). These are also not the only examples of Eve linked verbally with Milton’s Satan. She takes on a Satanic vocabulary: ‘If all this shake not thy obdurate will’ (IV, i, 181), recalling the traits of Satan’s ‘obdurate pride and steadfast hate’. At the opening of Dryden’s temptation scenes, Eve also begins to mirror the language of Lucifer, ‘Death may be there, or poyson in the smell’ (IV, ii, 22), directly following Satan’s despair at his ‘poys’nous’ breath. It is not my intention to suggest that this reveals a misogynist streak in Dryden, but what is of importance to my argument is that structurally both in terms of drama and story, each of these examples occurs before the moment of the Fall. As Stanley Fish has argued in Surprised by Sin, the comparison of Eve to Narcissus is offered by Milton in Paradise Lost for difference rather than similarity. Eve cannot be claimed to be vain in a fallen sense. If we are to follow Fish’s reading in this instance then Dryden has, in a manner, misread Milton’s intention, has read against Milton’s grain, despite his obvious desire to do the contrary and allowing for the qualification that he is in the first instance pursuing a dramatic point. Dryden, whilst advertising Milton’s priority of free will on the surface through Gabriel and Raphael’s discussions with Adam, dramatically indicates elsewhere that the Fall was not necessarily a unique occurrence, a failing of free will, but that Eve was predisposed to Fall; she was already showing signs of falling before the temptation of Satan. One could counter Fish and say that these incidents are just other examples of Eve’s free will and free thought, but I would suggest that the evidence shows the play is controlled by the event and knowledge of the Fall even before it happens. In that sense, although Dryden undoubtedly does not intend this, The State of Innocence expresses belief that Adam and Eve were fated to Fall and that responsibility must then fall at God’s door. To return to my earlier point, the story is governed by one organising principle, enforcing Kroeber’s distinction, and this is the Fall. But, the drama, the apportioning of blame, is found continually throughout the play, including moments before the event of the Fall, which generally indicates that Dryden writes a tragic drama against the epic grain of Paradise Lost (that is if we are to read Paradise Lost as a story of man’s disobedience through the exercise of his free will). Dryden needed to find a dramatic centre around which The State of Innocence turns, whilst also foregrounding the narrative ‘situation’ with which the well-known story of the Fall provided him. The interest for the present argument is in the role reading against the grain plays in the relation of one literary text to another. Almost by default, Dryden has become a reader, and perhaps writer, against the grain.

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IV The magnificence of Milton’s Satan was seemingly in little dispute in the eighteenth century, but as Addison showed, not all critics considered the character heroic, and most were able to separate moral from aesthetic approbation. Seemingly what C.S. Lewis really meant when suggesting that Dryden’s opinions of Satan were different from those held by Blake and Shelley was that the Romantic misreading was indeed a moral misreading. However, the evidence points to a reputation gained through the lofty and Latinate style of blank verse. Possibly the most eloquent defence of Milton’s style in the eighteenth century is given by Alexander Pope: ‘it should have been observed of Milton, that he is not lavish of his exotic words and phrases every where alike, but employs them much more where the subject is marvellous, vast, and strange, as in the scenes of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, &c., than where it is turned to the natural or agreeable, as in the pictures of paradise, the loves of our first parents, the entertainments of angels, and the like’.69 Pope’s view that Milton had weighted his language with his imagery and found an acceptable balance is in some ways more important than Burke’s insistence on the sublime orotundity of Milton’s idiom. Burke’s defence of Paradise Lost opened the poem up to the critique of Leavis. Most notable critics agreed in principle on the sublimity of Paradise Lost, although opinions may have been divided over whether this was a suitable criterion on which to judge poetry. Perhaps this was inevitable in a period where the couplets of Pope and Dryden were the poetic vogue. In hindsight, Milton was elevated by some of the ‘sublime school’ to the status of transcendent Tiresian prophet, apparently free from ideology, although undoubtedly this was as much a part of ideology as anything else. Yet, there also appears to have been an alternative view of Milton; that the poet’s own beliefs, ‘ideology’ for want of a better word, were far too obviously part of his poem. It is worth, then, considering briefly the impact that the known details of Milton’s life had upon his reputation, particularly the biography of Samuel Johnson, before moving on to the Romantic legacy proper. In 1760, Lord Lyttleton felt the need to explain why Milton’s poetry frequently fell out of favour: ‘The politicks of Milton [during the Restoration] brought his poetry into disgrace: for it is a rule with the English; they see no good in a man whose politicks they dislike. But, as their notions of government are apt to change, men of parts, whom they have slighted, become their favourite authors; and others who have possest [sic] their warmest admiration, are in their turn under-valued’.70 Milton’s poetic reputation does appear to have taken something of a battering in the eighteenth century, largely due to what little was known of his Republican sympathies. Dr Johnson makes a similar point to Lyttleton: ‘in the reigns of Charles and James the Paradise Lost received no public acclamations … Wit and   Alexander Pope, Postscript to the Odyssey (1723), in Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. Thorpe, p. 349. 70   Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. Shawcross, p. 249. 69

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literature were on the side of the court; and who that solicited favor or fashion would venture to praise the defender of the regicides?’71 No doubt, such isolation, whilst offering Milton’s detractors more weapons, was also exactly the quality that gave further weight to those keen to praise Milton’s transcendence of his own political time. The details of Milton’s pamphleteering, particularly his tracts on divorce, seem also to have left the poet’s reputation scarred.72 Milton’s more sensitive critics were, however, able to separate the man from his verse. In his biography of Milton, published in 1779, Johnson rubbishes the poet’s politics but singles out Paradise Lost for almost unqualified praise. It is best to deal with Johnson’s biography in some detail as it was, in most cases, the primary source for what the Romantic poets knew of Milton’s life and politics.73 To borrow one of Bloom’s terms of influence, the Romantic response to Johnson’s biography seems to have been to correct the precursor. The creative acts which led to the writing of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Byron’s Cain and Wordsworth’s The Prelude could well fit Bloom’s pattern of clinamen, in some respects the most operative subsection of The Anxiety of Influence: ‘This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves’.74 It also seems to define the Romantic poets’ relation to the Johnson biography. The general view is articulated by Thomas De Quincey – Johnson had grossly misrepresented Milton’s character for a variety of reasons, mostly political and polemical. De Quincey held that, while Johnson may have reported the facts to a point, he had warped them to be ‘scandalously false’ and ‘scandalously misconstructed’.75 De Quincey comments that a ‘simple rectification of the logic’ is necessary to pick out the real details of Milton’s life from Johnson’s invective or a reading between the lines. The ‘rectification’ is akin to Bloom’s clinamen (and this emphasises Bloom’s own tendency to subscribe to, and be influenced by, Romantic thought). De Quincey remarks: Facts, falsely stated or maliciously coloured, require, too frequently, elaborate details for their exposure: but transient opinions, or solemn judgments, or insinuations dexterously applied to openings made by vagueness of statement or   Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W.K. Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), p. 417. Hereafter SJ. 72   See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 287–8. Bizarrely enough, Milton became something of a figurehead for a sect known as the ‘Divorcers’. 73   For the best discussion of Johnson’s responses to Milton see J.R.Brink, ‘Johnson and Milton’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 20/3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1980): 493–503. 74   Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 14. 75   ROM, p. 499. 71

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laxity of language, it is possible oftentimes to face and dissipate instantaneously by a single word of seasonable distinction, or by a simple rectification of the logic.76

It is true that there is a certain amount of linguistic extemporising when it comes to Johnson’s vocabulary, and indeed part of this could be called laxity. The Milton of reduced spiritual virtues, tarred with the brush of Puritanism, of which Johnson writes, is certainly not the voice of radical humanism with which Wordsworth identified when he composed ‘Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour’. Johnson’s criticism of Paradise Lost also is often harsh: ‘The want of human interest is also felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure’.77 One gets the feeling Johnson believed that, if there existed a transcendent power here, then it was to be found in the sublime yet indeterminate language of Paradise Lost and not in Milton, who was a time-server. Even so, Johnson’s criticism places Paradise Lost above and beyond ordinary poetry, as did the cult of the sublime, whether he thought this was worth the effort or not. There is always reluctance in Johnson’s praise, and any admiration is given grudgingly. If the end of poetry is pleasure arising out of ambiguity, then Paradise Lost is for Johnson indeed fine poetry, but the organising imperative has for him serious drawbacks. De Quincey’s appraisal of Johnson’s style does have some firm foundation. Johnson could not subscribe to the opinion that the poet was also a hero, which, as we shall see with Coleridge, the Romantics certainly did. The nexus of Johnson’s attacks is actually the discrepancy between Milton’s words and actions, the latter not supporting the former. In asides he attacks the hypocrisy of Milton’s attitude to religion and politics. According to Johnson, Milton’s objection to academic education was based on the fact that men intended for a career in the church were allowed to act in plays: ‘This is sufficiently peevish in a man who, when he mentions his exile from college, relates with great luxuriance, the compensation which the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays were therefore only criminal

  ROM, pp. 499–500.   SJ, p. 439. Although Johnson may be being a little hard on Milton, as Burton Kurth points out, ‘Milton supplied that unifying focus of human interest which had been missing in the epic survey of Creation and universal history by Du Bartas.’ Burton O. Kurth, Milton and Christian Heroism: Biblical Epic Themes and Forms in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), p. 114. In comparison with other seventeenth-century Christian epics, Milton centralized human drama. The cosmological scale of Paradise Lost depends on the foregrounded human action for its meaning. The speeches of Raphael and Gabriel on the past war in Heaven and the future generation of mankind take their meaning from the central action of the Fall and not the other way round. For full discussion see Kurth, pp. 107–34. 76 77

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when they were acted by academicks’.78 In truth, as William Riley Parker points out, Milton only objected to offensive forms of drama.79 Elsewhere, Johnson recounts Milton’s motivation to return from his European sojourn as an example of the inconsistency between his words and actions. Milton’s return to England was initially prompted by the friction between the King and Parliament; however, it only resulted in him becoming a school-teacher, arousing some amusement in Johnson: ‘Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school’.80 Johnson’s unsympathetic portrayal of Milton’s personal life attacked a quality that the later Romantics held most dear: radical political consistency. Johnson’s appraisal of Milton’s political life is best summed up in his own phrase ‘great promises and small performance’.81 When describing Milton’s public life, Johnson’s note of disapproval becomes shriller. He detects rank hypocrisy in a Milton who could support Cromwell’s commonwealth and, to all intents and purposes, a variation on monarchy, having once been party to the execution of Charles I: ‘Nothing can be more just than that rebellion should end in slavery; that he, who had justified the murder of his king, for some acts which seemed to him unlawful, should now sell his services, and his flatteries, to a tyrant, of whom it was evident that he could do nothing lawful’.82 But just like Burke, Johnson places Milton in an equivalent position to the fallen angels of Pandemonium, having swapped one oligarchy for another in cheapened circumstances. Time and again in the eighteenth century, an aesthetic appraisal of Paradise Lost ends up conflating Satan with Milton. Milton, through Johnson, fires the Romantic appetite for free will of the kind that Satan and Milton might be considered to represent in explaining the poet’s reluctance to join the clergy: ‘He went to university with a design of entering into the church, but in time altered his mind; for he declared, that whoever became a clergyman must, “subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with him a conscience that could retch, he must straight perjure himself”’.83 Johnson’s opinions lead to the natural conclusion that Milton was of the devil’s party, and that he knew it all too well. Without intending it himself, Johnson surely contributed hugely to the traditional view of the Romantic misreading.

SJ, pp. 388–9. See Parker, p. 49 and particularly p. 81: ‘we may remind ourselves that Milton never objected to drama; he objected … to degrading kinds of drama, particularly plays in which men of God made public fools of themselves.’ 80   SJ, p. 392. 81   SJ, p. 395. 82   SJ, p. 401. 83   SJ, p. 389. 78

   

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To be fair to Johnson, he is not quite as one-eyed as these examples or De Quincey’s comments would suggest. While Johnson finds difficulty in appreciating Paradise Lost as poetry, he is nevertheless an acute reader. His style is also, in most parts, balanced: It appears, in all his writings, that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others; for scarcely has any man ever wrote so much and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal; he set its value high, and considered his mention of a name as security against the waste of time, and a certain preservation from oblivion.84

It is true that in Paradise Lost, only two historical figures, Virgil and Galileo, whom Milton saw imprisoned whilst travelling in Italy, receive direct mention.85 Johnson does, in the main part, report the facts, and they are only slightly skewed. However, as regards Paradise Lost, one assertion, that I believe is incorrect, does need addressing because of its importance for reading against the grain. Johnson comments that Paradise Lost has ‘distinctly and clearly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle, and an end’. In some ways, more helpful to understanding Romantic reading habits, this is not quite true. It would actually be more accurate to describe the epic as having an end, middle, and a beginning in that order. As Romantic clinamen, like the Romantic Fragment Poem, is defined by the desire to complete a poet’s text according to the reader’s desires, the inversion of the parts of narrative sequence makes greater sense. The reader enters Paradise Lost at the end of one story, the war in heaven, and leaves it at the opening of another, man’s journey into the world and temporal history. It is a story which begs to be completed by the clues left by Milton – clues which, as I commented earlier, point towards a search for a new Paradise within the imagination. We have reached in essence a starting point from which to consider the Romantics’ own versions of Paradise Lost.

84

   

85

SJ, p. 390. Parker, Milton: A Biography, pp. 178–9.

Chapter 3

Blake

Through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me survive, I follow here the footing of thy feete, That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete. (Faerie Queene, IV, ii, 34)

This is the main tragedy of human life. Oh, it is terrible! Terrible! You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. You have to obey him like a slave. He makes you work like a horse. And for what? For who? (Saul Bellow, Seize the Day)

I In the Interchapter of The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that ‘If to imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems antithetical to their precursors, then to imagine after a poet is to learn his own metaphors for his acts of reading’. If any poet tries to construct his readership, teach them, or transfer metaphors of how to read it is William Blake. For Nelson Hilton, when it comes to reading Blake, ‘textuality exists while we’re in the midst of it’. This is true not only for readers of Blake but also for Blake’s characters (if we can even securely call them characters and not states of being). The figures that fill Blake’s prophetic books are constantly ‘in the midst of it’, in the sense that we witness them becoming themselves before our eyes. When we read Blake’s prophetic book Milton, the text which will naturally occupy most of my attention in this chapter, we are constantly aware of characters on the cusp of becoming themselves or at the threshold of an experience that is about to occur. Because although Blake is very much an apocalyptic or millenarian writer, in the dissenting tradition of Milton, his apocalypse is, as Angela Esterhammer has argued, ‘a strangely open-ended one’. Most recent scholars agree that, whether in terms of politics, theology or the  10   Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford, 1973; repr. 1997), p. 93.  10   Nelson Hilton, ‘& the play of “textuality”’, in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicholas M. Williams (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 85.  10   Angela Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, in Nicholas M. Williams (ed.), William Blake Studies, p. 71.

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production of a material text, Blake crafts ‘poems’ that intentionally exist without, or beyond the possibility of, a full stop: ‘Blake encourages a productive openness, an avoidance of foreclosure’. If this all sounds very postmodern that is because it is – Paul Hamilton for one traces the postmodern creed of indeterminacy back to the kind of sublime authorisation of imprecision that Burke fostered and Blake clearly plays a prominent role in the maintenance of the tradition. Edward Larrissy recently outlined the impact of Blake on postmodern literature and theory, suggesting that a debt is owed not just by Ginsberg but also by Dylan Thomas, Thomas Harris, Thomas Pyncheon and even Ted Hughes, while Vincent de Luca notes that ‘there is less anachronism than one might initially imagine in attributing certain kinds of critical understanding characteristic of the poststructuralist era to Blake’s sensibility’. But while the influence of Blake on the processes that actually constitute what it means to read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is wide and varied, his role in altering the way critics have read Paradise Lost is just as significant, so it is important that the present book first approaches Romantic writings on Paradise Lost through Blake’s eyes. It may actually be the case that the contemporary view of Blake’s relationship with Milton is still, at least outside the world of Blake scholars, most frequently reduced to the enigmatic assertion from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. It is therefore one of the purposes of this chapter to reconsider this statement. But this can only be done by considering the larger challenges that Blake poses to the reader of Paradise Lost through his idiosyncratic brand of verse and his refusal to follow Milton even when he may seem most like him. It is true that Blake’s work cannot be thought of in terms of what we might call the ethics of orthodoxy. What I mean by this is that Blake’s moral conception of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, more properly ‘evil’ in the context of Paradise Lost, were not those held by Milton, who, however heterodox, did not at all consciously wish to move moral goalposts. When Blake identified the ‘Angels & God’ and the ‘Devils & Hell’ of Paradise Lost as contrary forces, he was working within a framework  10   Edward Larrissy, ‘blake and postmodernism’, in Williams (ed.), William Blake Studies, p. 270.  10   Paul Hamilton, ‘From sublimity to indeterminacy: new world order or aftermath of Romantic ideology’, in Romanticism and Postmodernism, ed. Edward Larrissy (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 13–28.  10   Edward Larrissy, ‘blake and postmodernism’, pp. 254–73; Vincent de Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton, 1991), p. 10.  10   William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford and New York, 1975), p. 17. The precise date of The Marriage is difficult to specify, but Blake probably began work in 1789 and finished in 1790. All references to The Marriage are taken from this edition of the illuminated book.

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not of Christian ethics but one that was largely of his own devising and that he would continue to devise and re-devise throughout his working life. The notion of evil as potential for imaginative growth, rather than as a product of the will, certainly appealed to Blake. And the murky origins of evil as presented in the text of Paradise Lost, whilst biblically explicable, leave enough room for just such imaginative, possibly Promethean, resonance. As I have established, Milton’s God foregrounds the free will with which Satan and the Fallen Angels were created: They trespass, authors to themselves in all Both what they judge and what they choose; for so I formed them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthral themselves: I else must change Their nature, and revoke the high decree Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall. (PL, III, 122–8)

The insistence of Milton’s God on the free choice, and consequent responsibility, of Satan is central to Byron’s reading of the character and also, as I will later explain, to the Byronic hero. The semi-paradox is explained by Milton as follows: without the potential for obedience to God’s law, there would be no way in which Satan and his cohorts could follow the words of Coriolanus and become ‘authors to themselves’. The primary aspect to be noted here is that Satan is only his own creator on the terms of Milton’s God. As Paul Hamilton puts it, ‘Like Satan in Paradise Lost, our journeys are never original, only perverse, and the country into which we travel has already been mapped by a moral orthodoxy we can refract or invert in various ways, but never escape’. For Blake, as will become apparent, this is the tragedy of Milton’s Satan. Satan’s freedom lies in the choice to obey or to rebel. Without such freedom there could be no indication of merit or faith, just as there could be none of disobedience or transgression: ‘Not free, what proof could they have given sincere/ Of true allegiance’ (III, 103–4). There exists a difference, however, between willed transgression and the transgressions experienced by the imagination. Bernard Beatty, for example, argues that this is the central difference between Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Byron’s Manfred: ‘The [Coleridgean] imagination is enthralled rather than appalled by … transgressions’. There is enough hinting in Milton’s language to suggest the transgression of imaginative self-authorship, which the Romantic poets held in such high regard. Naturally, this would be a reading against the grain of authorial intent. Milton’s point is that original evil, if I can use such a term to describe the devil’s fall from heaven, was undertaken of Satan’s own willed volition. It is also  10   Hamilton, ‘From sublimity to indeterminacy’, pp. 15–16.  10   Bernard Beatty, ‘Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door’ in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool, 1988), p. 3.

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true that God’s teleology for the world anticipates a counteraction to Satan.10 A theoretically simple choice, between good and bad, obedience and disobedience, is placed before both Satan and Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. The same choice is placed before the reader (who is always destined to make the wrong choice if Stanley Fish’s version of the poem is followed). Unlike the narrow confines of Puritanism, or more especially Calvinism, in which good or bad acts of the human will are largely irrelevant to God’s greater moral purpose, Paradise Lost seems to express an equally austere theodicy in which the correct choice is everything. Within the poem it is also true that the choice to be made is between two contrary impulses – good and evil. Yet Blake consistently makes the reader aware that the urge towards selfauthorship, defined most spectacularly by Milton’s Satan, is to be fraught with difficulties in Romantic literature and often accompanied by negative connotations. Take the opening of The Book of Thel for example. Gerda S. Norvig argues that the figure of Thel is structured ‘in a way that invites mutually exclusive interpretations’ – rather than make the story of Thel central to reading the poem, Blake instead makes interpretation of Thel the key issue.11 Norvig argues, ‘How, except by a liminal reading, for example, can we negotiate such oppositional critical stances as the following: Thel is an egocentric adolescent misguidedly denying the life of mature love and spiritual openness; Thel is a disembodied, selfless soul properly resisting the prison-house of earthly existence; Thel is an innocent balking at experience; Thel has left innocence behind and seeks experience untainted with the tenets of Natural Religion; Thel has an incurable death wish; Thel has incurable erotic curiosity’.12 Blake points the reader towards the kind of interpretative quagmire that Newlyn and Belsey find in Paradise Lost, but in Blake’s case there can be no doubt that the verification of meaning is being deliberately withheld. The initial description of Thel is an arrangement of similes that makes her appear less than substantial: Ah! Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud. Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,

10

  Although God does not intend Satan’s rebellion, knowing that it will happen He has already willed the counter-effect. There is a scriptural dichotomy between firstly, the prophetic belief that ‘presupposes divine intervention in the day-to-day affairs of the world’, John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959) p. 81, in which God blesses Adam and Eve with the birth of Seth, not to compensate for the death of Abel but to maintain the purity of the descent of man; and secondly, the Jewish faith in which God adheres to one plan since the beginning of time. 11   Gerda S. Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading in(to) Blake’s Book of Thel’, in John Lucas (ed.), William Blake (London and New York, 1988), p. 150. 12   Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity’, p. 150.

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Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant’s face, Like the dove’s voice, like transient day, like music in the air. (I, 8–11)13

It is not, however, the content of the similes or of the images chosen that constitutes the indeterminacy of Thel’s character. It is the requirement of simile in the first place to stand in for direct description – rather than being denotative, Blake’s language is associative, and the use of association means that the ways of ‘seeing’ Thel immediately begin to proliferate. If Thel makes the poet first conjure an image of a watery rainbow, then it is not Thel but the rainbow that then prompts Blake to consider the image of the departing cloud. Equally, while the two images of reflection in line nine appear to yoke Thel into a more solid simile, it remains true that the reflection in the mirror is not exactly the same as the shadow upon the water. The images are close relations while not being synonyms. But neither are they antonymns. As Thomas Weiskel puts it, words become significant ‘not in what they mean but in that they mean’ [italics added].14 Blake’s attempts to ‘author’ the character of Thel only prove that her identity is endlessly provisional and dependent on the next image to come along. The ordering of the images implies potential change in the character’s nature, but she does not actually act and so the reader relies upon the guidance of Blake to pass a judgement on her. It becomes apparent, however, that the narrator of The Book of Thel, can only provide one perspective on Thel and author her subjectively. In response to his first attempts to present Thel figuratively, the poet collapses exhausted under the exertion: Ah! Gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head, And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time. (I, 12–14)

The result is another example of the accretive nature of Blakean language at work, as the repetition of the word ‘gentle’ brings into question the nature of what it means to be gentle. The fallen medium of language provides gentleness with several partially related accoutrements – all loosely connected to sleep – while the repeated word peculiarly takes on the force of a proper noun rather than an adjective. It appears to be another one of the characteristics of Blake’s polysemous use of language that there occurs slippage between grammatical categories – words take up residence in relation to other words indicating that meaning is always partly reliant on other language. ‘Gentleness’ prompts each of the four states above, but they do not follow neatly one after the other; rather, they seem to be disconnected interrogations of gentleness and its relative virtues or vices. As 13   Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York and London, 1979), p. 62. 14   Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, 1976), p. 181.

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usual with Blake’s language, a word, in this case gentle, starts to unravel the more precisely it is defined. Jonathan Roberts tells us that the reason Blake sought to unsettle normative grammatical modes of association was that he despised the limited capacity of rational thought indicative of Newton, Locke and Burke: ‘Reason, in Blake’s view, has no content of its own, but is a way of interrelating knowledge, and can therefore only connect sense experience to other sense experience’.15 ‘Reason’ is undoubtedly notio non grata when it comes to Milton’s Satan as well. Unlike William Godwin, for Blake the rebellion of Satan was no substitute for the perceived tyranny of Milton’s God: ‘By deconstructing what he sees as Milton’s binary moral scheme, and by demonstrating that the law-giving Jehovah is one and the same with the exiled and vilified Satan, Blake allows a redemptive principle to emerge which need be identified with neither one nor other of those “negations”’.16 Lucy Newlyn argues that Blake attempted to unite or reconcile contrary impulses characteristic of the rational mind into an imaginative homogeneity.17 I would prefer to describe his revisions of Paradise Lost as transcending the ‘binary moral scheme’ that Blake associated with the poem by using its generative energy. The principal issue at stake is that Blake wholeheartedly denied the rational appeal of Milton’s Satan. The very word ‘reason’ was anathema to Blake, signifying for him the falsity of the Deists, Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as the reductive associationists already mentioned. In The Everlasting Gospel, a work that is an epitaph of sorts to Blake’s canon, he stresses the negative qualities of reasoning and the doubts into which it leads: When the Soul fell into Sleep And Archangels round it weep, Shooting out against the Light Fibres of a deadly night, Reasoning upon its own dark Fiction In doubt, which is Self Contradiction? Humility is only doubt, And does the Sun & Moon blot out Rooting over with thorns & stems The buried Soul & all its Gems. (4, 91–100)18

  Jonathan Roberts, William Blake’s Poetry: a reader’s guide (London, 2007), p. 13.   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 275. 17   Newlyn argues that in Milton, ‘Blake seeks to reverse the damaging effects of Milton’s self-division by making him face up to the implications of his hypocrisy, and perceive that the law-giving God he has elevated is as faulty as the Satan he has demeaned’, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 261. 18   Blake’s Poetry and Designs, eds Johnson and Grant, p. 368. 15 16

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Despite Blake’s insistence on the primacy of Selfhood, such subjective personal sovereignty, when grounded in reason, can become a solipsistic uncertainty for the visionary artist (as his failed attempts to relate the nature of Thel would seem to indicate). Blake takes to the extreme the ramifications of the Cartesian model of consciousness, in which the subjective individual is removed from the object of the world or the object of the text. Godwin, who left his ministerial position to declare himself an atheist, suggested that reasoning ought to circumvent the religious choice between absolute right and wrong. He emphasised instead a secular search for truth and justice through the implementation of empirical facts, removing him from the influence of Miltonic doctrine, whereby reasoning is virtually inseparable from free will: ‘reason (reason also is choice)’ (PL, III, 108). Blake, it appears, attempted something similar, but on a visionary and aesthetic scale not previously witnessed and certainly not by means of Godwin’s brand of rational empiricism. The two short epigrammatic pieces which preface Blake’s collected works explain exactly why he did not consider rational fluency to be the basis of Satan’s appeal. The first is There is no Natural Religion, the second being All Religions Are One. They are also, I believe, the best guide to the conceptual assumptions, if not the mythology, behind the longer works so are worth quoting before looking more extensively at Milton. In There is no Natural Religion, Blake offers his most concise critique of associationism: I Man cannot naturally Perceive. but through his natural or bodily organs II Man by his reasoning power. can only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv’d. III From a perception of only 3 sense or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth IV None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions V Mans desires are limited by his perceptions. none can desire what he has not perceiv’d VI The desires and perceptions of man untaught by any thing but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense. … Conclusion. If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophical & Experimental would soon be a ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again19

Blake savages Locke’s notion that man is merely an aggregate of his sense perceptions. What associationism cannot account for, in Blake’s vocabulary, is the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ – a concept borrowed from Collins’ Ode of the same name – that does not rely on the traditional connectives inherent in grammar or even larger structures such as narrative sequence. Both, of course, depend on the 19

 

Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Johnson and Grant, pp. 14–15.

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conceptual range of the rational mind. For Blake there exists, in the imagination of man, an intuition of the infinite that will be found within his personal compass and not in the traditional forms of literature and art: ‘The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man’ (Marriage, 8). The ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ is exactly what Newlyn means by the ‘redemptive principle’ of Blake’s thought – a principle independent of ‘negations’ – that include both Milton’s God and Satan. Blake’s ideal man has the potential to become his own God, but only if the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ is regained or, to put it in Blake’s terms, Rintrah is unleashed: ‘Thus men forgot that/ All deities reside in the human breast’ (Marriage, 11). The ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’, what we might express in less esoteric terms as the Romantic imagination, also has inevitable implications for the key precursor text, Paradise Lost. In The Gates of Paradise, Blake makes a specific connection between the negative distinctions of Godwinism and the devil: Two Horn’d Reasoning Cloven Fiction In Doubt which is Self contradiction A dark Hermaphrodite We stood Rational Truth Root of Evil & Good20

There can be no doubt that ‘Horn’d’ and ‘Cloven’ reasoning links the creed of associationism to the devil here. But is this necessarily Milton’s Satan? ‘Fiction’ need not mean Paradise Lost and could merely suggest that Blake believed any being approximating to the devil to be fictitious. The final line, however, suggests that Paradise Lost does play somewhere about the margins of these comments. Presumably Blake’s phrase the root of ‘Evil & Good’ means that ‘Rational Truth’ is, as an end in itself, an evil, but that out of this evil may spring a powerful imaginative reaction, or a force of good. In other words, this is the lesson of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell repeated, in which everyday moral contraries are united or overthrown by the imagination. In doing so, however, Blake seems not to be distancing himself entirely from Paradise Lost. In fact, I would argue that he appears to be adopting the same model of the justification for evil as Milton did before him, the only difference being the nature and detail of the evil described.21

20   The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Garden City, NY, 1965). 21   Perhaps this is an example which proves that Blake’s relationship with Milton is less of an anxiety than Harold Bloom maintains. Blake seems quite prepared to adopt the Christian models of Milton’s ‘justifications’, albeit with slight alterations. This is also true when Blake has Milton take on human form to return to generation in Milton. The passage undoubtedly suggests the Incarnation of Christ, although without going further than suggestiveness.

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If it is true that ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ (Marriage, 7) then the reader’s attempts to pursue Milton’s Satan as a stable sign here will be prey to the infinite regress cautioned by M.H. Abrams. The same goes for the figure of Milton himself. We are some way from the ordered nature of Miltonic allusion in the Renaissance. Esterhammer writes that ‘Each of Blake’s multidimensional words calls up a wealth of possible significations, while avoiding the direct path to a distinct referent’.22 Sometimes allusion to Paradise Lost is purposefully compromised as a ‘distinct referent’ by Blake’s use of an indeterminate context within his own text (as distinct from an indeterminate context which results from the crossing over between texts). When he alludes to Milton’s allegory of the creation of Sin in Milton, for example, Blake not only makes reference to a prior text but actually dramatises the process of misreading as well: entering the doors of Satans brain night after night Like sweet perfumes I stupefied the masculine perceptions And kept only the feminine awake. hence rose, his soft Delusory love to Palamabron: admiration join’d with envy Cupidity unconquerable! My fault, when at noon of day The Horses of Palamabron call’d for rest and pleasant death: I sprang out of the breast of Satan. (Milton, 10, 4–10)23 I weeping hid in Satan’s inmost brain: But when the Gnomes refus’d to labour more, with blandishments I cam forth from the head of Satan: back the Gnomes recoil’d. And call’d me Sin, and for a sign portentous held me. (Milton, 10, 36–9)

Blake continually employs a metanarrative throughout the prophetic texts that, according to De Luca, recounts ‘a crisis in reading’.24 Here it is the Gnomes of Palamabron who are placed in the position of readers who misinterpret the creation of Leutha from Satan’s brain because the event recalls the creation of Sin in Paradise Lost. By labelling Leutha ‘Sin’, the Gnomes as readers reduce her purpose to the tyranny of a stable sign, while Blake spins his own narrative, which is actually not a narrative at all but a dramatisation of misreading. It could be argued that the story of Leutha’s creation does not really exist for any purpose other than to create a theatre of misreading whereby Blake views the limitations that unenlightened readers place on the potential of Paradise Lost to achieve its status as a truly prophetic text. As with most Romantic poets, the bugbear for Blake is the limited capabilities of other (prior) readers.

22

  Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, p. 70.   William Blake: Milton a Poem, ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi (London, 1998), p. 133. All references to Milton are taken from this edition. 24   De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 30. 23

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Of most importance is the fact that emphasis ought to be placed on the liberating experience of reading and not on the fallacy that Blake is somehow transporting us to another more enlightened plane of existence. But De Luca rightly cautions that the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ (what he terms the ‘Intellectual Powers’) does not allow us access to ‘some imperious act of untroubled seeing’ either. Instead, he argues, ‘when we find ourselves first attracted and responsive to Blake’s text, it is certainly not because we have been afforded a comprehensive a priori vision of its meanings, but rather because we sense the fullness of its potential … We are dealing here not with the meaning of the text but with the pleasure of the text’.25 It should be apparent that the affects and purposes described are almost identical with those we saw in Burke’s treatment of the sublime in the previous chapter – indeed this is the basis of De Luca’s argument. But we can now be more precise. The primary site of interest has switched from the attainment of meaning to the process of reading. In order to emphasise this, Blake situates a variety of figures (or readers with different levels of sophistication) within a discourse of viewing and reading that mirrors our own experiences of the text. No perception will be entire, just as the knowledge and insight that comes with innocence cannot be retained in a state of experience. The pattern of limited perspectivism is demonstrated in Plate 16 of Milton when the feminine sixfold emanation that constitutes Milton’s wives and daughters is introduced. They watch Milton’s journey through space: In those three females who his Wives, & those three whom his Daughters Had represented and containd. that they might be resum’d By giving up of Selfhood: & they distant view’d his journey In their eternal spheres, now Human, tho’ their Bodies remain clos’d In the dark Ulro till the Judgment: also Milton knew: they and Himself was Human, tho’ now wandering thro Death’s Vale In conflict with those Female forms, which in blood & jealousy Surrounded him, dividing & uniting without end or number. (Milton, 16, 1–8)

Through a complex interplay between the eternal and the finite, Blake complicates the notion of a straightforward univocal reading of the central action of the poem. It is noticeable that Blake makes rapid switches here, between concepts of both space and time, designed to unsettle us. The wives and daughters watch Milton from ‘their eternal spheres’, but they remain simultaneously part of the corporeal world: ‘now Human’. Their bodies may be enclosed in ‘dark Ulro till the Judgment’, implying the sort of apocalyptic end to time that occurs in the Book of Revelation, but they will also continue in the process of ‘dividing & uniting without end or number’. While the earthly actions that constituted the lives of these six women have been reduced to watching Milton career through space, they are also made part of an ongoing present time, endlessly repeating whilst never 25

 

De Luca, Words of Eternity, pp. 32–3.

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reaching a point of conclusion. Any attempt on their part to ‘know’ Milton (and additionally Paradise Lost) univocally is therefore doomed to regress. The past tense suggests that they might be ‘resum’d’ at the same time that they have already been resum’d and will continue to be resum’d through the poet’s use of the present participle: ‘dividing & uniting’. Both limited and limitless, while these women continue to inhabit their secular bodies – in other words, they wander through ‘Death’s Vale’ experiencing the petty conflicts of domestic life with Milton – they know, as does he, that another perspective could change meaning, although it would never fully wrench off the previous meaning. They stand both within and without time and space, as does Milton, and their reading of him can only be, as with our own, ambiguous. Strangely, the lives of Milton’s wives and daughters are always completing yet never complete because they are part of a larger picture (literally in Blake’s case) called language. It should be clear that if Blake has an organising principle in his verse, the kind that Levinson finds complicated by fragment poems, then it is in making an allegory out of the reading process; bringing into question what language, including the proper names of his characters, actually mean, or whether in the metaphorical universe that Mark Sandy described as constituting Romanticism they can actually mean anything at all. Douglas Knight, writing about Paradise Lost in 1964, makes the point that I think we should still consider in relation to Blake: ‘where for Dante and Virgil there is one universe, within which both reader and actors exist for the duration of the poem, for Milton there is a multiple universe of which the actors only experience a part while the reader must understand all’.26 Once again the discourse of parts and wholes that Fish raised comes into play. Blake adopts this model of multiple narrators from Paradise Lost but crucially makes his readers, in which we must include ourselves, defective, or alternatively gives them access to readings that appear on the surface to be contradictory. Understanding ‘all’ is a foreign experience to readers of Blake because, as Norvig writes, he engineers a scenario where ‘interpretive dissatisfaction is courted as intensely as interpretive satisfaction’.27 Knight was one of the first critics to understand, as Newlyn and Levinson would later, that to fully comprehend Romantic reading processes demands considering new paradigms or organising principles of understanding. So Knight anticipates Fish in arguing of Paradise Lost that ‘the real centre of the poem is interpretation rather than narrative’.28 Fundamentally, however, the centre of Paradise Lost is exegesis rather than deferral of meaning via a concentration on the experience of reading. This is a distinction Knight fails to make between Milton’s and Blake’s use of narrative form. The locus of Blake’s Milton is, as I have established, as much the reader as it is the events of the poem, just one of the ways in which Blake successfully   Douglas Knight, ‘The Dramatic Centre of Paradise Lost’, SAQ, 53 (1964): 50, 44–59. 27   Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity’, p. 150. 28   Knight, ‘The Dramatic Centre of Paradise Lost’, p. 58 26

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goes about ‘thematising ambivalence’. Newlyn has argued for such a reading by adapting Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘aspect’ or reading blindness: ‘[Blake] can alert the reader to the limitations of his or her moral perspective, by exposing the ‘aspect blindness’ of those who witness Milton’s journey’.29 Something of this reading blindness is undoubtedly experienced by a variety of characters within the poem as well. It seems true that while you exist in one state (the two most obvious being Innocence and Experience) you cannot simultaneously be in or comprehend another as Satan discovers: ‘And Satan sat sleeping under his couch in Udan Adan/ His Spectre slept, his Shadow woke: when one sleeps th’other wakes’ (Milton, 20, 2–3).30 Knight’s interpretation of Paradise Lost is without question one inherited from Romantic reading habits, which assume that any sort of competitive voice in poetry constitutes, in Bakhtin’s terms, full-blown dialogism. Paradise Lost, it must continue to be asserted, is written partly in a Classical, partly Hebrew, tradition and is a story in which the central actions all lead to visible consequences, most obviously in the case of the Fall. This central incident and its aftermath are presented as they happen, in the sense that the story of the act of disobedience happens in real time. I would argue that if the reader is to be educated in Paradise Lost, then it is through seeing the progressive unfolding of actions in process that allow their moral significance to become apparent. But if the reader is to be educated by Blake it is through experiencing the, quite different, alteration in the scale of our perceptions. The identity of Blake’s ‘characters’ is therefore always ongoing and conditional so long as the prophetic poems continue to be read. Rather than occupy a settled place in one narrative as do Milton’s Adam and Eve, Blake’s figures slip through time to become part of all narratives, which always follow the same generic pattern – this is the well-known cycle of Orc or the ‘same dull round’ from There is no Natural Religion. In the following extract we witness just how differently organised are Milton’s and Blake’s universes. Blake’s Satan is not punished for pride or original evil, but for failing to make himself exempt from historical necessity. He is a figure perpetuating the same dull round of injustice: And it was enquir’d: Why in a Great Solemn Assembly The Innocent should be condemn’d for the Guilty? Then an Eternal rose Saying. If the Guilty should be condemn’d, he must be an Eternal Death   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 266.   De Luca makes a similar argument concerning the Blakean sublime: ‘What is the barrier to the faculty allied with sense is an avenue to its more privileged counterpart – and, paradoxically, the avenue becomes available only if the barrier is posed. The sublime stimulus then operates as a kind of psychic traffic light, beckoning one power of the mind to come forth only when another is blocked’. Harriet Kramer Linkin has gone further and made a linguistic investigation of the ‘idiolects’ or languages that constitute the states of Innocence and Experience and showed they are, in fact, markedly different, ‘The Language of Speakers in Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, Romanticism Past and Present 10/2 (1986): 5–23. 29 30

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And one must die for another throughout all Eternity. Satan is fall’n from his station & never can be redeem’d But must be new Created continually moment by moment And therefore the Class of Satan shall be calld the Elect. & those Of Rintrah, the Reprobate. & those of Palamabron the Redeem’d. (Milton, 9, 15–22)

And so on ad nauseam. Hence, when Blake describes war in Milton he does so not in terms particular to the American or French Revolution (although these examples of war were most prominent in his thoughts) but in a way that aims to be universal to the recurring features generic to human conflict. Satan ‘flaming with Rintrahs fury’ at the Assembly on Plate seven, manifests his wrath in a manner that recalls the war in heaven in Paradise Lost but the description, or a near neighbour, could be found in any of Blake’s other prophetic works: He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll, Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease Punishments & deaths musterd & number’d; Saying I am God alone There is no other! Let all obey my principles of moral individuality I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses Of my Eternal Mind, transgressors I will rend off for ever, As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering. (Milton, 7, 21–9)

The irony for Satan is that his claim to ‘moral individuality’ is the one factor that denies him his chance to be different or unique in Blake’s text. The grandiose claim reveals itself to be empty rhetoric, drawn as it is from his self-proclaimed ‘Eternal mind’. Satan merely confirms through his assertion of individuality that he plays a role in an endlessly recurring pattern of tyranny and repression. Even at the very instant he claims to ‘rend off’ transgressors forever, he denies that possibility by confirming his own current role as just such a transgressor. For Blake this is the cosmic, eternal drama that constitutes the human condition. I wrote earlier that characters like Thel and Palamabron slip away from being stable signifiers, but Northrop Frye was right to argue that Blake’s Satan, as a symbolic referent, is always pernicious because ‘in the human mind he is the death impulse of Selfhood which reduces men to becoming either death-dealing tyrants or torpid and inert victims of them’.31 But the reason Frye is correct here is because Milton’s Satan is enslaved to Milton’s God. His urge to self-authorship is undermined, like that of the associationists I described earlier, because it is defined, as we saw Hamilton argue, on limited terms that existed prior to his creation. Satan’s failure in Paradise Lost to truly author or father himself can only be repeated by rote in Blake’s prophetic books because Satan replicates the 31

 

Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947), pp. 134–5.

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lessons that history (as recounted in Paradise Lost) has already taught us. Hence in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the devil reiterates the rhetorical position (which as I argued above is also a tragic position for Blake) that he also occupies in Paradise Lost: ‘2. That energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good is alone from the Soul … Energy is the only life and is from the Body: and Reason is the bound or circumference of Energy’ (Marriage, 4). Nothing, for Blake, has ever advanced through the devil alone because he plays upon the reader’s desire for the same dull round of physical or rational conflict in which Milton’s God and Satan engage. In some ways this is, I suppose, a tragedy of language – the limitations that rational and proper grammatical usage place on readers (and on Satan as an orator) mean the intuitive Poetic or Prophetic character remains inaccessible to them. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it therefore becomes apparent that the deliberately provocative statement in which Milton is accused of siding with the devil despite his better judgement is something of a verbal trick. Blake counts on the fact that the reader will focus narrowly on the word ‘Devil’ as a stable signifier due to the persistence of orthodox notions of Christian ethics. The central issue that is really at stake is what it means to be a ‘true poet’, which would mean destabilising the signifier ‘Devil’. A misreading is encouraged by Blake to educate the reader. By boldly citing the devil of Paradise Lost, Blake, as we have already seen in the case of the word ‘gentle’ in The Book of Thel, poses the question: what does the word ‘devil’ actually mean or symbolise? Rationally, the devil (particularly in the Book of Job) is an antagonist, representing the desire to joust interminably with God. Milton’s Satan is therefore clamped in a logical vice that is partially of his own devising and from which he cannot worm free through the further application of logic or reason. Mirroring Satan’s mistake is the reader who places the word ‘Devil’ in a series of stably inherited connectives involving evil. But for Blake the connectives that order thought in the rational mind must be abandoned to liberate the imagination. By playing on the reader’s conception of the contrary states of good and evil in The Marriage, Blake makes an implicit argument that two stock responses – to agree or disagree with this statement – immediately occur. The argument can only ever be implicit because Blake has a habit of using images and imperative statements to do the work of normal discursive processes. A reader’s first response would be to consider Milton to side with his Satan, the second would be to reject Blake’s apparent meaning and take the side of God. One way would be to read with the grain of authorial intent, the other to read against it. Either way is equally pernicious because someone else – actually Blake in this case – has laid down the terms of the debate. The choice for the reader is not truly a free one, and so the reader becomes like Milton’s Satan, trapped in a dualistic bind in which he is entirely complicit, unable to unsettle the verbal structures of the text. To truly gain visionary liberation, the reader needs to take the spirit of Blake’s text rather than the letter and create for himself. As De Luca writes of Jerusalem, ‘our procedures are additive, as we move painfully from line to line exploring the

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dens of the text’.32 Any meaning will do as long as it is our own. Anything else is, for Blake, a reading made against the grain. II As the centre of attention for Blake’s verse is not the ordinary principles of narrative and epic, which involve linearity and successiveness, Milton must in some senses disrupt our experience of time. Indeed it could be argued that the concept of linearity is hostile to Blake’s atemporal view of history. It is worth reading the plates of a text like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in a randomly chosen order to fully appreciate that the poem, for Blake, cannot be finished in a conventional sense by a termination or Aristotelian ‘end’. In order to alter the reader’s experience of time, Newlyn argues that Blake employs what Barthes called a ‘writerly’ text: ‘[Blake’s Milton] constantly encourages the reader to play an active part in the redemptive process’.33 John Lucas has argued that this sort of reader-response theory will play an increasing role in Blake studies.34 The ‘intangling’ that underwrites Fish’s reader-response theory is, in my view, even more applicable to a poem like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or the prophetic books than it is to Paradise Lost. However, Blake’s intangling is, as we have just seen, designed Romantically to centralise the indeterminacy of poetic language and the experiential function of reading. This is why I believe that in The Marriage Blake decided to put reading against the grain, which he viewed as the pernicious and undeserved legacy of Paradise Lost, once more into action. His purpose was to instruct the reader in the appreciation that visionary verse is an interrogative ongoing art that does not repeat the enslavements of the past. The Romantic imagination has the ability to create anew rather than rely on associations made between the old – originality is typically paramount. Through his own educative reading process, Blake intended to liberate Milton from his perceived misreaders who would otherwise hold him, like his character Satan, in a logical bind. Joseph Wittreich rightly argued that ‘a part of the older poet’s vision has already been penetrated; thus the new prophet concentrates on what is still hidden or on what has been misunderstood’.35 In The Marriage, as we have seen, Blake exposes the reader’s default settings – to side with God or with Milton’s Satan. To follow the stated argument of Paradise Lost is to submit to authorial intent, an authorial intent that reduces the poem in Blake’s hands from a vibrant living dialogic text to the dead letter of verifiable meaning. To this end Wittreich has argued, ‘There is a spirit of contention with which Blake approaches most of the poets he illustrates, as well as his open avowal, cited by   De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 32.   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 276. 34   Introduction to William Blake, Lucas (ed.), pp. 23–5. 35      Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison, 1975), p. 225. 32 33

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Bloom, that he must create his own system rather than be enslaved by another man’s’.36 To use another man’s system is clearly for Blake the greatest sin. The unshackling of the mind from the oppressive connectives of logic and reason is the theme that dominates the poem Milton and so the subject to which I will turn again now. I want to use Milton to further develop what it means to read against the grain and the repercussions for the form of poetry. I particularly want to articulate just how the poem turns the misreading it would hope to avoid back onto Paradise Lost. As I have stated, Blake positions himself in the line of Hebrew prophecy that he views running directly from the Bible to Paradise Lost. But rather than see his references to Milton’s work as what we would ordinarily call allusion, Blake found the lesson of Paradise Lost to be the release from prior models of thought that restricted the blossoming of the imagination: ‘Milton is a poet, revolutionary in his attitudes towards all traditions, artistic, and intellectual alike, who, instead of being the Great Inhibitor, is the agent who freed Blake from the tyrannies of art and history’.37 Milton has thrown off the classics of Greek and Roman literature, and Blake wants to repeat the revolutionary action. For this reason Milton is given by Blake, in fairly explicable terms, an historical and eternal plane of existence that again functions through blurring the finite with the eternal. Whence is this Shadow terrible? Wherefore dost thou refuse To throw him into the Furnaces! Knowest thou not that he Will unchain Orc? & let loose Satan, Og, Sihon & Anak, Upon the body of Albion? …………………………………………………….. Yet in deceit, They weave a new Religion from new Jealousy of Theotormon! Milton’s religion is the cause: There is no end to destruction! Seeing the Churches as their Period in terror and despair: Rahab created Voltaire; Tirzah created Rousseau; Asserting the Self-righteousness against the Universal Saviour. (Milton, 22, 31–4 and 37–42)

The reason Albion is ‘yet in deceit’ is that orthodox notions of both Christian ethics and the associationist rational dogma of Locke persist in stifling the human mind and are yet to be overcome. The notion that the sinisterly anonymous ‘They’ create a ‘new’ religion is actually ironic on Blake’s terms, where no such religion can ever be wholly new but must be traced by the same template as its precedents. The jealousy of Theotormon might seem entirely specific to the current vision, but less focus should be applied to the name of Theotormon than to the fact that jealousy is a recurrent emotion that constitutes part of the Nietzschean Orc cycle   Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, p. 222.   Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, p. 231.

36 37

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of historical patterning. The proper names ‘Rahab’ and ‘Tirzah’, whilst playing a role in Blake’s story, also hold less significance to the total experience of the poem than the fact that Voltaire and Rousseau have allowed themselves to be created by another, just as Milton’s Satan fails in his rebellion because he allows himself to be created by Milton’s God. It does not matter at this point exactly what negative connotations Rahab and Tirzah hold in Blake’s mythology. As so often in Blake’s verse, it is the dynamic connectives of verbs that hold more importance than what proper nouns might mean or what characters stand for. According to Esterhammer, these nouns constitute purposefully ‘unfamiliar signifiers and invented names for which we have no referents’.38 The identity of the fathers of Voltaire and Rousseau pales in significance compared to the fact that they have allowed themselves to be intellectually fathered at all. Other patterns in the extract are also familiar. It is noticeable that it is not Milton but his ‘religion’ that is offered as the ‘cause’ of enslavement to models of government, the church and philosophy grounded in reason. In a reversal of the priority of parts and wholes that I recorded in my introduction, Blake absolves Milton exactly because he moved temporarily into the state of orthodox religious belief that any person can inhabit. The entirety of Milton’s eternal person does not, however, reside in this mistaken position. Blake unproblematically abstracts Milton from the larger evil just as each manifestation of the visible church has its allotted period but is understood to be only part of the whole problem. Blake is able to then reauthor Milton as a saviour on his own terms rather than via the use of Milton’s, Godwin’s, Locke’s, Rousseau’s or the terms of any other number of precursors. It goes without saying that those who fear that Milton will unchain Orc and restart the cycle of historical necessity do so because they see Milton on his terms and not through their own eyes. At this point of the vision, the men of Earth cower before the revelation of the prophet, Los (the symbol of artistic and eternal time in Blake’s mythology), who appears to them as if he was Milton’s Satan unleashed from Hell. Yet, Los only represents Satan in his historic or temporal form, the form which creates the death impulse of Selfhood, described by Frye, reducing spiritual and artistic principles to the shackles of contrariety. Grammatically, of course, the fact has already been proven. Just as I noted that images stand in for narrative or rational explication in Blake’s verse, so absolute statements, whilst knowingly offered as subjective points of view, are given the license of cold hard fact without having to be logically proven. Here Blake creates the illusion of factual asseveration purely by writing. Writing something makes it so, and Blake tells us without fear of contradiction that ‘Milton’s religion is the cause’, that ‘There is no end to destruction’, that ‘Rahab created Voltaire’ and that ‘Tirza created Rouseau’. Esterhammer reminds us that ‘Blake’s grammar relies on affirmative statements, but invests such statements with performative force’. She also tells us that, as in this instance, Blake relies heavily on ‘the performative power of “is”’: 38

 

Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, p. 76.

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When the poet claims that “The Male is a Furnace of beryl; the Female is a golden Loom … or “Ulro is the space of the terrible starry wheels of Albions sons” … he defeats our usual assumptions about the way statements should be read, by conflating literal and figurative, abstract and concrete, and by using proper names for which we have no referents outside of his poetry.39

If we follow Esterhammer and agree that for Blake ‘to create a state is always to make a statement’40 then it reinforces our understanding that Blake continues to make the imprecision of perception or interpretation the primary centre of organisation in Milton. Significantly, the list of statements cited above need not, and indeed do not appear to, have any temporal connectives. Each could exist separately of the others because of Blake’s affirmative, non-successional technique. Where Paradise Lost depends on the fulfilment offered by plot organised through the temporal successiveness of events, whereby we can accurately say, for example, that Satan fell from Heaven through first coveting the place of Christ at God’s right hand, Blake’s Milton on both a local and extensive level apparently attempts to defeat the very notion of succession or temporal exegesis. As with the culmination of Jerusalem, where Esterhammer argues that narrative ‘gives way to arbitrary declaration’,41 the experience of reading Milton is designed to disrupt the traditional connectives that sustain narrative and epic (the same connectives that are disrupted on a smaller scale in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In fact the entire text of Milton not only explains the transition that Blake makes from narrative to declaration; it enacts it as well. For example, if we return to the episode in the ‘Bard’s Song’ where Satan is described as having ‘incomparable mildness’ and offers to do the work of Palamabron, taking over his Harrow, we find the temporal order defeated. In the first instance, the intentions of Satan appear noble and selfless, but the reasonableness of the character hides his deception. Here, humility, in Blake’s hands, is not a Christian virtue, but another facet of oppression. Palamabron’s Gnomes revolt against Satan who tearfully complains to Los. The assembly is called in Eden, recalling Satan’s own in Pandemonium, to settle the differences of Palamabron and Satan. In Blake’s case, however, Satan reveals his true nature in an outburst of temper: For Satan flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness Accus’d Palamabron before the Assembly of ingratitude! Of malice: He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll, Of moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease. (Milton, 7, 19–24)

39

    41   40

Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, p. 79. Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, p. 79. Esterhammer, ‘blake and language’, p. 81.

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Both Los and the reader are brought by Blake to the sudden realisation that ‘Satan is Urizen’ (8, 1). Blake reveals the real nature of Satan by increasing the perspective of the reader, through the very structure of his poem, a technique to which Bloom alerts us in his notes to Erdman’s edition of the poems (what he calls ‘Blake’s daring in manipulating his perspectives’).42 The poem Milton is, then, not a narrative as we would usually understand it but, rather, a widening as much as a lengthening of perception through stripping away layers of meaning. Blake’s point is again that Milton’s Satan, and his own, is only that which we perceive him to be. The reader’s conception of the character lies completely within the range of their personal perceptions, and it is the purpose of Milton to engage the reader in the act of personal perceptive growth. This is what Newlyn had in mind when she wrote, ‘the reader is forced to adjust his received ideas’43 to the Blakean reading experience. It is also true that ‘Enitharmon and Los see Milton’s descent only as a Satanic threat … Their partial vision indicates unreadiness for receiving the whole truth’.44 For Blake, the readiness is everything. Blake, then, actively attempts to instruct the reader in how to read Paradise Lost by avoiding the visionary limitations that attach to authorial intent. To liberate the text from the dogma of intentionality is, for Blake, a safeguard against readings against the grain which are based on moral quarrels with Milton’s God. Reading against the grain manifests itself in Paradise Lost by forcing the reader to take sides, as in a playground dispute, with one character on the terms of another. Allan H. Gilbert usefully restates in the twentieth century the same opinion of Milton’s readership that Blake held: ‘The problem is whether a critical preconception or misconception is to rule one’s reading of poetry, or whether the words set down by the poet are to count’ [italics added].45 Subtly Gilbert shifts the focus of our attention from a stable understanding of Milton’s argument, which we might say has already been set down by the poet, to the less secure domain, in a poststructuralist sense, of words. The ‘grain’ of misreading now becomes for Blake (and Gilbert) the false belief that encoded in the text is a hard and fast meaning to be accessed through language. Instead, the text or words of the poem, rather than Milton as author, become disassociated from originary authorial intention and the meaning becomes the actual experience of language forming. Yet if Blake’s radical methods aim to show that language is ambiguous and to treat it as such (in the specific sense that words have the potential to perpetually engage in different ways, signifying different things and therefore creating new meanings), the ramifications for form, particularly exegetic narrative, need more 42

  ‘The Bard’s Song is not the story of a sequence of events, but rather “a series of lifting backdrops”, a brilliant experiment in the shifting of visionary perspectives’, commentary by Harold Bloom in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Erdman, p. 825. 43   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 277. 44   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 266. 45   Allan H. Gilbert, ‘Critics of Mr. C.S. Lewis on Milton’s Satan’, SAQ, 47 (1948): 220, 216–25.

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focused attention. Altering the mode of narrative that underpins Paradise Lost through an enlargement of perception could itself result in just the reductive brand of moral misreading that the poem Milton is trying to circumvent. Newlyn describes the vision of Los and Enitharmon as ‘partial’ because Blake emphasises the subjectivity of the reading experience. The reader becomes aware that, as in the case of a Romantic Fragment Poem, they are invited to give a version of, but not complete, the poem. Milton may contain elements of narrative, but really it presents just one moment, a Romantic ‘epiphany’, as Newlyn describes it: ‘As a moment of epiphany, the descent of Milton can be temporally and physically located at the point where his spirit enters the tarsus of Blake’s left foot, when the lark-song is heard and the scent of wild thyme fills the garden at Felpham. But it expands to take up most of the narrative, and is multi-layered, both in its mythical associations and in its symbolic implications’.46 As when Blake’s Satan is revealed through his wrath at the assembly, the presence of Milton in the text as Blake’s hero is really one single moment, but seen in different ways. Again, what matters is not what the moment of epiphany is understood to mean by its different witnesses but that it is understood to mean different things. Indeed it is probably due to Blake’s perverse sense of humour that the one meaningful action in the text appears slightly ridiculous in contrast with the foregoing mythology of the Bard’s Song: Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star. Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift: And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there: But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe. (Milton, 14, 47–50)

The visionary climax of the poem therefore occurs as early as the bottom of Plate 14 in a book running to 46 plates. The ensuing poem does not advance in linear time but instead circles around the drama in the garden, adding variations to the central event. Typically for Blake’s ‘additive’ mode, this constitutes the explosion of an unfathered vapour, rather than the culmination of a series of events as in the Fall of Paradise Lost. As De Luca comments, ‘The hero of Milton perhaps comes the closest [of all characters in the prophetic books] to enacting a traditional epic journey, but since it consists, strictly speaking, of a single, instantaneous vertical descent, it is as unorthodox a literary journey as one is likely to find’.47 The Fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost may be a moment explosive enough, but we must allow that its origin lies in a failure of the will to choose good and that it cannot be explained away by prior events such as the kind of feelings encountered by Eve in her dream or the Narcissus episode. Nevertheless the uniqueness of the Fall can only be understood from its place within a narrative where preceding 46

   

47

Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 264. De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 58.

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and succeeding events are considered. The relation of distinct parts, or episodes, some more central to the story than others, makes up the whole. In Blake’s Milton, however, every part has the potential to overthrow its place in the text as a whole, whilst simultaneously failing to be more important than any other. Blake apparently democratises meaning in this way, but actually makes it unverifiable as De Luca explains, ‘Every line, letter, or grain is “significant” in the sense that it is impressed with a self-subsistent signifying power, which is its principle glory’ [italics added].48 If every word, part or ‘grain’ has the potential for equality of meaning then it becomes impossible to make distinctions and determine relations in the ‘whole’ in any ordinary sense. Blake’s desire to disrupt continuities has been achieved. Of course the endless play of signification is itself provisional because, as Lucas sensibly asserts, ‘some readings are better than others’.49 Wittreich lists some of the most relevant ways of seeing Milton’s epic journey: Blake’s epic not only anatomizes and mythologizes a moment in Milton’s life, but it defines the significance of the moment. Therefore, Blake must necessarily explore the obstacles to vision that Milton in this moment overcomes. There are the poet’s personal failings both in friendship and in marriage, both as father and as husband; there are the political, actually theological, mistakes that led Milton to defend the regicides and the obviously theological ones that disturbed the focus of Comus and Paradise Lost. All these failings and errors are dispelled in Milton’s moment of triumph – a moment in which Blake sees not only an individual regeneration but the potential, at least, for a general resurrection.50

So we might expect never to have one dominant perspective in Blake’s Milton, which is the crucial point of Newlyn’s reading of Paradise Lost, reemphasising the priority of indeterminacy. But strangely, as Wittreich suggests, the dominant view in Blake’s Milton, which unites all others, does emerge with more authority, if not always with absolute clarity. It could be argued that such overt polysemy actually cancels itself out because it becomes viewed as the proper end of a liberal ideology; a liberal ideology that, as Fish has argued over again, is alien to Paradise Lost. What I am arguing then is that holding Paradise Lost open to a multiplicity of meanings by reading it as ‘interpretation’, not narrative, must be, in some sense, to subscribe to the logic of Blake and not Milton. That is, to do what Bloom believes is inevitable, but what I am not so convinced about, and read one poet, the precursor, retrospectively through another. After all, if we can follow this Bloomian pattern then it must be one that registers consciously enough with the reader to be considered without having to be put into practice. My reading might seem to endorse Newlyn’s belief that Paradise Lost contains a multiplicity of meanings,   De Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 41.   Introduction to William Blake, Lucas (ed.), p. 23. 50   Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, pp. 243–4. 48

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none of which emerges as dominant, as opposed to Blake’s Milton, which has one dominant moment and one dominant way of interpreting that moment. However, what I am actually arguing is that Paradise Lost, because it is a story and because narrative is its organising imperative, is created of multiple moments (not the single moment of Blake’s vision) that stand in relation to one another. They are distinct in their parts, and no one part stands in for the whole, but paradoxically through this very distinction one dominant voice and argument does emerge – that both Satan and Adam and Eve fell through a failure of the will, although they were equally free to obey. If we read Paradise Lost as a Blakean ‘interpretation’ and not a narrative then the dominant meaning will be lost. It is only because this single dominant voice clearly emerges, not because it is absent, that readers feel the need to read against the grain of Milton’s authorial intent or, as in Blake and Newlyn’s case, to suggest that the dominant voice is absent. Balachandra Rajan rightly argued that Romantic critics can be seen as pioneers in suggesting that the poem may well be more significant and more capable of imparting its real complexities to us when it is laid open not to a disjunctive reading but to one that inhabits rather than overrides the poem’s crucial dissensions. This fundamental perception is probably more important than the views of Milton’s Satan and of Milton’s God with which the perception is associated and which have encouraged the simplistic conclusion that the Romantic response to Paradise Lost is no more than a matter of turning the poem upside down.51

By focusing on Blake’s aesthetic, rather than political, revolution it becomes apparent that merely turning the poem upside down was what Blake chose to avoid. The only problem remaining is that by aesthetically redrawing the relations between words on a local scale and entire actions on a grander one Blake leaves Paradise Lost precariously prey to his hated misreaders. The rejection of one facet of reading against the grain – that which plays out Milton’s exegesis involving the political and religious understanding of God and Satan – replaces it with another brand of reading against the grain. The latter is more of a traditional poststructuralist misreading. But it is also a formal misreading which we will soon encounter in other Romantic poets, in which narrative as a mode is overthrown by the epiphany that constitutes vision. When one temporal moment, the scenario that Wittreich describes above, presides over others, Satan can be unleashed through glamorous aesthetics as a political hero or religious anti-hero. Wittreich uses the word ‘moment’ five times in the extract above – emphasising the real distance between Blake’s Milton and Paradise Lost. Milton may be viewed from various angles, but one, the widest perspective that Blake and the enlightened reader can presently offer (seeing Milton as a new Christ) must dominate. Blake’s   Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, 1985), pp. 126–7. 51

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Milton is not then really open to varied interpretations – paradoxically because it suggests that it initially is. But, in Paradise Lost, a narrative in which parts really do depend upon each other for their significance, if one part is left to stand for all others then we could quite easily arrive at exactly that narrow or ‘partial’ reading experience that Blake would like us to avoid. This is because the most obvious and frequent manifestation of this type of reading against the grain in Paradise Lost, as Blake knew and as I have already explained, is the one in which Milton’s Satan is taken as hero either morally or through aesthetics that conceal a moral underbelly. The first two books set a perspective through which all later incidents are viewed – it may be a false perspective, but if the text is considered to be an interpretation and not a narrative then it would be a valid one, and it would be a misreading. Newlyn makes it absolutely clear that this formal reading against the grain operates in Blake’s reworking of Paradise Lost: ‘he attempts to make Milton “just and true to his own imagination”, by releasing the prophetic potential of Paradise Lost from the epic mode in which it is confined’.52 This means releasing Milton from his form, particularly his narrative, which constitutes a formal reading against the grain – but it could also lead exactly to the point where, by always finding a part to be as significant as the whole, the reader considers Milton’s Satan to be the poet’s true hero. In releasing the reader from reading against the grain through his brilliant experimentation with perspective and narrative, Blake engineers a situation in which the habit could flourish, even if he would never endorse it. By attempting to avoid misreading, Blake finds he has to consciously reassert its presence in Paradise Lost.

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Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 261.

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Chapter 4

Wordsworth

Our thoughts take the wildest flight; even at the moment when they should arrange themselves in thoughtful order (Byron)

I have dealt first with Blakean vision, but it would be more accurate to say that Romanticism has come to be seen as a period in which the lyric was the dominant form of creative expression. The primary reason for this is simply that the lyric is undoubtedly the clearest medium for rendering the interiority of poetic consciousness, or rather the attempt to render that interiority at work. Romantic language, as we have seen with Blake, has a tendency to become circuitous, paratactic or unfixable where the establishment of meaning is concerned. Milton’s language functions in a different way; the overarching authority of his argument governs his use of polysemy. McGann writes that in Wordsworth’s great lyrics – ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the ‘Immortality Ode’ – the mind finds a correlative or projection of its own powers in the natural world replacing ‘what might have been a picture in the mind … with a picture of the mind. The lyrical experience allows the reader privileged insight into the workings of the poetic consciousness, and in this way Wordsworth’s verse is continually trafficking between the internal and the external, allowing the mind to emerge through its encounters with the world at large. The primary focus of this chapter will not be on lyric per se, however, but on the poem that signalled Wordsworth’s epic intentions – his intentions to follow Milton and produce a work of such weight and consequence that it would define an era – The Prelude. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand that despite being an extensive and complex meditation on the powers of the imagination, The Prelude ought to be considered as closer in its purpose to the lyric than to the classical epic form. Following the previous discussion of Blake’s Milton, I am going to further elaborate on the nature of unfixed interpretation that underwrites so much Romantic verse, distinguishing it from that of Milton. In Book one of the 1805 Prelude, for example, Wordsworth debates the theme of the Romantic lyric poet, asserting that metaphorical or figurative language is always, for him, on the cusp of construction: Thus occupied in mind, I lingered here Contented, nor rose up until the sun  10   Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London, 1983), p. 87.

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The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost Had almost touched the horizon; bidding then A farewell to the City left behind, Even with the chance equipment of that hour I journeyed towards that Vale that I had chosen. (1805, I, 95–100)

Wordsworth is discovered at a point of transition here, in the process of leaving the city behind for a more comfortable meditative life. But the production of his poetry is also, at this moment, at a transitional threshold. While the ‘chance equipment’ of the hour may well refer to any type of rambling kit, it also refers to the emergence of thought, the transition of thought into words and therefore verse, where the poet’s equipment could be a storehouse of remembered images or any facet of nature which happens to lie about him. The occasional quality of the forming of verse should not be missed – 15 lines earlier he describes an equivalent process: ‘On the ground I lay/ Passing through many thoughts, yet mainly such/ As to myself pertained. I made a choice/ Of one sweet Vale whither my steps should turn’ (I, 79–82). The choice is both to head geographically towards Grasmere and also to fix his ‘many thoughts’ on a single straightforward image: ‘one sweet Vale’. At this point in the narrative, with the poet sifting through the jumble of returning thoughts and memories, the choice of a monosyllabic utterance is entirely appropriate as a way of grounding the notion of the solitariness and uncomplicated pleasures anticipated in the Vale ahead. Wordsworth makes two decisions – the first is where to head, the second is how best to describe it. It is a recurring process played out throughout The Prelude in which the reader witnesses not only the poet’s past journeys but also his ongoing creation of a ‘picture of the mind’. Wordsworth’s description of the reawakened imagination is not unlike the gradual disclosure of Satan’s disordered thoughts that seemed to lie behind Burke’s discussion of attonitus. The Prelude could not, however, be more differently structured to the narrative of Paradise Lost. While Milton carefully and rhetorically establishes his argument at the opening of Book one, Wordsworth characteristically feigns the relinquishment of control to a more organic narrative format: ‘whither shall I turn,/ By road or pathway, or through trackless field,/ Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing/ Upon the river point me out my course?’ (I, 29–32). Paul de Man has argued that such a focus is an implicit statement of intent, ‘where we would traditionally, in works of epic tonality, have expected an invocation to the muse, we are given a landscape instead’, which is supported by Wordsworth’s comments on epic openings in the Preface to Poems 1815: ‘Epic Poets, in order that their mode of composition may accord with the elevation of their subject, represent themselves as singing from the inspiration of the Muse,

 10   WW, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford, 1984; rev. 2000), p. 377. All references to The Prelude are taken from this edition.  10   Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 125.

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“Arma virumque cano”, but this is a fiction, in modern times, of slight value’. Wordsworth appears to reject the notion of a classical epic opening, including the kind in which Milton invokes Urania as his muse, in order to foreground the self-reliance of the imagination, nourished and sustained by its own self-authored power. Yet De Man is undoubtedly right to stress that Wordsworth’s epic will be defined by ‘tonality’ as much as subject. It is through allusion to Paradise Lost and striking an epic tone that the poet’s subject – the growth of the mind – is first considered: Now I am free, enfranchised and at large, May fix my habitation where I will. What dwelling shall receive me? In what Vale Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest? The earth is all before me … (I, 9–15)

Wordsworth presents the reader with a series of questions that await an answer, but allusively he famously stands in relation to Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost who, on expulsion from Eden discover that The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. (PL, XII, 646–9) [italics added]

Where Adam and Eve are about to enter temporal history for the first time, Wordsworth is already deeply immersed within it and has found Providence not in any theological sense but immanent in the natural world. Newlyn has recently placed The Prelude in the dissenting tradition that we have already seen become synonymous with Milton in the late seventeenth century, ‘although Wordsworth’s is a secular vision, this is a deeply Protestant poem’ concerning ‘the private nature of conscience, whose accountability to God wasn’t governed by the prescripts of the Church’. She reminds us that ‘Wordsworth shared with his dissenting predecessors Bunyan and Fox a belief that the spiritual is apprehended in and through the material’. The imagination’s responses to the natural world, rather than a stated argument, therefore become the organising imperative of the poem.  10   WW, p. 627.  10   Lucy Newlyn, ‘“The noble living and the noble dead”: community in The Prelude’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge, 2003), p. 55, pp. 55–69.  10   Newlyn, ‘community in The Prelude’, p. 65.

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Robert Rehder acknowledges the same point and adds that ‘Luther’s notion of justification by faith means that your religion depends on what you feel, that our raison d’etre must come from within’. Significantly, the sentiment tallies once again with the post-structuralist emphasis that ‘what you see depends on where you stand’. It is noticeably the process of wandering, solitude and inward rumination – the themes of Protestant progress and also of post-structuralist theory – that translates from the end of Paradise Lost and strikes the epic tone of The Prelude, rather than the thought of a transcendent destination. In Paradise Lost, Gabriel has, of course, already informed Adam in great detail of the future of mankind. The archangel lays significant stress on terminal value and location as he advises Adam to look forward with faith in God and to meditate not only on his current loss but also ‘on the happy end (PL, XII, 605) [italics added]. Wordsworth may have an idea that Grasmere lies ahead, but any sense that this is an ultimate destination, and the poet’s final terminus, is compromised by the emphasis through De Man’s ‘tonality’ of the ongoing construction of poetry in the mind. It may be true that the various versions of The Prelude make it clear that the poem is neither ‘trackless’ nor ‘floating’ but is carefully designed to impress the power of the imagination upon the reader. What cannot be denied, however, is that The Prelude is organised in a much different way to the integrated argument of Milton. While Satan is first concerned in Paradise Lost to establish his surroundings and the immediate physical ramifications of the war in Heaven, the poet of The Prelude makes the unfolding of consciousness, rather than the establishment of meaning, his focus. Rehder has argued that to be true to himself Wordsworth ‘must be true to his perceptions’ and that his concern ‘to mark nuances is his recognition of the ever-changing data of consciousness’. The register of such nuances, as we shall see, is not unlike the additive nature of Blakean language, but in Wordsworth’s case the ability to spin a yarn that deliberately unravels is less obviously programmatic. When the Satanic figure of the discharged soldier intrudes on the poet’s secular paradise at the end of Book four of the 1805 Prelude, for example, it is unclear as to what is the purpose of the vignette. As Michael Baron notes, ‘Wordsworth seems more interested in representing process and relationships than in defining terms’.10 Partly this is because Wordsworth’s interest in metaphor sprang from his reading of David Hartley’s Observations on Man ‘linking the theory of association with the idea of progress’ that convinced Wordsworth of the practicability of ‘a steady improvement in man’s associative capacities’.11 All that can be said for certain of the encounter with the discharged soldier, however, is that it was an unsettling  10   Robert Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 27.  10   Stevie Davies, Milton (New York, 1991), p. 20.  10   Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 84. 10   Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (London and New York, 1995), p. 7. 11   Newlyn, ‘community in The Prelude’, p. 60.

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experience and to a degree remains so upon reflection. Of most importance are the ways in which the poet’s mind seeks out continuities in his experience and new ways of relating the incident. Rehder suggests that it is often the case at such uncanny and significant moments that ‘many experiences have been compressed and amalgamated’12 into one in the poet’s consciousness, which is a view worth attention despite the fact that Wordsworth selects the occasion for its singularity. Significantly, one of the experiences here seems to relate strongly to, and be framed by, Wordsworth’s reading of Paradise Lost: From many wanderings that have left behind Remembrances not lifeless, I will here Single out one, then pass to other themes. A favourite pleasure it hath been with me, From time of earliest youth, to walk alone Along the public Way, when, for the night Deserted, in its silence it assumes A character of deeper quietness Than pathless solitudes. (1805, IV, 360–68)

The poet’s delight is initially described as ‘pleasure’ and appears to the youthful eye to border on the kind of joy that Adam and Eve experience in Milton’s Eden. The silence figuratively attributed to the pathway anticipates the soon to be discovered reticence of the soldier. But as with Blake, the ‘character’ of the scene that apparently borders on a brand of innocence has less singularity than first suggested and is actually described in more generic terms as a state of being: O happy state! What beauteous pictures now Rose in harmonious imagery – they rose As from some distant region of my soul And came along like dreams; yet such as left Obscurely mingled with their passing forms A consciousness of animal delight. (1805, IV, 392–7)

The difficulty Wordsworth encounters in relating the ‘happy state’ is perhaps more interesting than what he actually manages to successfully describe. The poetry initially suggests a symbiotic harmony between boy and nature, but the description presents anything but the regulated imaginative synthesis we might expect. As the poet begins to recount the ‘beauteous pictures’ and ‘harmonious imagery’, he breaks off, the mind captured by the process of forming an image rather than the content of the figure. Instead of relating the images of harmony to the reader as advertised, the nouns remain in a neutral, almost tautologous, relation to each 12

 

Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 85.

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other. It is the verb rose that dominates attention by book-ending the crucial but fragmented line. The sense of movement that emerges from the prior stillness is profound but in some ways empty of significance. Metaphorically the dream recalls that of Eve and her inability to decide on the ramifications of disturbing thoughts, but the child Wordsworth significantly has no Adam alongside to reassure him. What it appears Wordsworth is doing is actually preparing his reader for the otherwise abrupt intrusion of the soldier into what is essentially still a childhood world. Certain anticipatory elements suggest the scene is not actually one of perfect pleasure – not only through the failure of Wordsworth to recall what images were suggested to him but also through the accumulation of negative associations that sound a note of transgression. Wordsworth uses verbs (such as creeping (374), intruded (379) and exhausted 381)) that hint at a psychological disturbance and anxiety bordering on guilt in the poet’s relationship with the landscape. The submerged threat remains obliquely rendered, however, due to the fact that the bridging descriptions of the boy’s stealthy progress and movement dominate the passage – ‘I slowly mounted’ (370), ‘On I went’ (375), ‘I slowly passed along’ (377), ‘from time to time’ (378). The tension that underwrites the scene is then fully revealed in a type of crescendo as the poet recollects ‘Thus did I steal along that silent road’ (385). As Jane Stabler has argued, Wordsworth was often keen to suggest ‘the effects of both gradual and sudden turns of feeling’ in his verse and the passage endorses her point that ‘two forms of change are kept in continual play’.13 One is the gradual revelation and modification of the imagination at work; the other is the sudden appearance of the soldier on the road. What is difficult to state, however, is who is intruding on whom here. Because the poetry gradually prepares the reader for what is not in fact an abrupt shift in mood and subject, the status of the discharged soldier is somewhat indeterminate. Initially his appearance suggests an unsettling combination of the familiar and the alien. Rather than being simply ghoulish, it is the subtle degree in which the apparition departs from the average male that communicates the child’s fascination. Like Milton’s Satan, he is of superior dimension, but the description also recalls the grotesquery of Milton’s Death and Sin: A foot above man’s common measure tall, Stiff in his form, and upright, lank and lean; A man more meagre, as it seemed to me, Was never seen abroad by night or day. His arms were long, and bare his hands; his mouth Shewed ghastly in the moonlight; from behind A milestone propped him, and his figure seemed Half–sitting, and half–standing. (1805, IV, 406–13)

  Jane Stabler, ‘Transition in Byron and Wordsworth’, Essays in Criticism, 50/4 (Oct. 2000): 313, 306–28. 13

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The figure is caught in a moment of silent repose that is also a liminal state – halfsitting and half-standing. His situation upon the ‘milestone’ indicates an officially appointed marker of distance and transition, which has presumably caused the man to rest due to both its practicality as a seat and because it prompts a natural tendency to evaluate his journey so far. By placing the soldier at a point that implies decision – whether to stop or to proceed – Wordsworth invites the reader into the consciousness of another person at a significant moment. The soldier himself seems, however, quite absent mentally from the scene, absorbed as he is within a private interior world. All that can be recorded at this moment is more anatomical detail. Each feature is exaggerated by the combination of the effects of moonlight and the feverish imagination of youth, while physically the soldier is almost a contradiction; while being partially recumbent he is nevertheless upright. Like Milton’s Satan he is mentally ‘Fixed to his place’ but unlike Satan is defined as being silent and to all intents and purposes uninterpretable. When the soldier finally speaks it is not with words that carry meaning but an inarticulate sound that again suggests both physical and mental anguish: From his lips meanwhile, There issued murmuring sounds, as if of pain Or of uneasy thought. (1805, IV, 421–3) but he remained Fixed to his place, and still from time to time Sent forth a murmuring voice of dead complaint, Groans scarcely audible. (1805, IV, 429–32)

As the child Wordsworth strains to listen for the sound of the soldier’s voice, the adult poet reflecting on the scene finds that language fails him too, relying twice on the word ‘murmuring’ to capture the ‘scarcely audible’ tone. The poet is in the position of making sense out of the nonsensical. Murmuring is the extent of the soldier’s articulation, but in a corresponding sense the poet is likewise forced to become a murmurer, suggesting sound rather than meaning. The word ‘murmuring’, a favourite of Wordsworth’s to describe the sound of water, is itself internally repetitious and carries the suggestion of onomatopoeia. Language that is used to recount the voice comes to resemble exactly that which was heard. Equally when the youth finally approaches the soldier he finds only a reflection of his own actions: I left the shady nook where I had stood, And hailed him. Slowly from his resting–place He rose, and with a lean and wasted arm In measured gesture lifted to his head, Returned my salutation, then resumed His station as before. (1805, IV, 435–40)

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In practical terms Wordsworth recounts a scene in which the action of the soldier simply mimics the salutation of the boy – the soldier adds nothing new to the encounter through repeating the child’s greeting. The divide between the two is further blurred by the voyeuristic nature of the scene in which the boy pries like Satan into Eden but finds only a projection of himself rather than a creature of beauty. The boy’s role is suitably described in military terms as a sentry on patrol, ‘Without self-blame/ I had not thus prolonged my watch’ (432–3) [italics added]. The sheer amount of repetition in the account, both in terms of repeated words and the repetitions of actions, suggests a mirroring effect in which elements of the soldier blur with the perceptions of the boy in the poet’s mind. The fallen nature of Romantic language means it is unable to fully separate the subject from the object, and the one ends up reflecting the other. As the poet tries to read the significance of the soldier, the lines teem instead with a wasted verbosity that fails to grasp the meaning of the ‘ghastly’ apparition. Even when the soldier offers his tale, the poet gives his own version recorded in his own words, unwilling to sacrifice his voice to the authority of another. And there can be no doubt that the soldier holds a magisterial authority that mesmerises the boy. This is the encounter of a young man with a full-grown adult who knows the value of language and holds the dominant social cards. Although Wordsworth recalls that ‘ere we to the wood were come/ Discourse had ceased’ (479–80), it is once inside the promised cottage that a difference as profound as the one that lies between Blake’s states of Innocence and Experience is revealed. In his only direct speech, the soldier enigmatically tells us, ‘My trust is in the God of Heaven/ And in the eye of him that passes me’ (494–5) – perhaps the motto of a regiment or simply a declaration of personal faith in God? It is in any case a closed announcement that begs for more explanation than that presented, not unlike the epitaph inscribed on a tombstone. This is in direct contrast to the gauche explanation of the boy who speaks with an inappropriately formal ostentation: At the door I knocked, Calling aloud, ‘my Friend, here is a Man By sickness overcome; beneath your roof This night let him find rest, and give him food, If food he need, for he is faint and tired’. (1805, IV, 483–7)

It is the enigma of the soldier’s manner – weary yet strong, absent yet centred, lost yet at home – that prompts the boy, like Milton’s Samson, to fill the scene with an explanation that can cover the practical aspects of the tale but cannot grasp the melancholy presence of the full-grown military man. The child Wordsworth appears at the door like a bad actor who learns his lines but does not understand them. The irony of the situation is particularly acute when contrasted with the poet’s judgement that the soldier seemed ‘as of one/ Remembering the importance of his theme/ But feeling it no longer’ (476–8). Despite the note of thanks on which the scene concludes, it is difficult to say just how heartfelt the valediction

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is, as on this occasion it is the youth who simply returns the soldier’s ‘blessing’ (501) like for like. The close of the incident recalls the opening – ‘Back I cast a look,/ And lingered near the door a little space’ (502–3) – as the boy once more finds himself playing the part of a Satanic eavesdropper, struck dumb or perhaps embarrassed into silence. Newlyn argues that ‘Milton’s epic provided Wordsworth with the connection between his life-story and the grand narrative of mankind’s fall from innocence into experience’.14 In the story of the discharged soldier, the process is enacted more fully than anywhere else in the poem as the adult poet, through allusion to Paradise Lost, records a transitional moment in his own life where he became intuitively aware of a greater presence than his own mind. It matters little that the episode is characterised more by Burkean terror than a ‘glimpse of beauty’ because, as Newlyn rightly points out, ‘his own imagination emerges the stronger’ from the trial.15 Rehder notes that Wordsworth’s ‘emphasis is on moments and moods’16 as he tries to keep the reader ‘in touch with the quick of his thoughts at the moment of composition’.17 The ambiguity of the episode is therefore less important than the fact that the movement of thought is presented through ‘a sustained analysis of an intensity and a psychological precision’.18 It is the fact that everything about the encounter suggests a liminal moment which holds the greatest significance for Paradise Lost and further removes Wordsworth’s purpose and reading paradigm from that of Milton. Leslie Brisman has argued that the Romantics’ relationship with Paradise Lost is one in which ‘Fiction and faith form a continuum in which false surmise is an imaginative equivalent of transcendence, in which every “perhaps” points to an essential romantic insight that we live beyond ourselves, in possibility’.19 We have seen the discharged soldier introduce a transcendental ‘perhaps’ in several ways but primarily in the ambiguity of the allusion to Satan entering Eden. What is hinted at is something similar to what Stuart Ende has termed ‘a moment of ease that interrupts the poem’s progress to a higher truth’.20 That belief needs a couple of qualifications, however, as regards The Prelude, and suitably they impinge directly upon Wordsworth’s relationship with Milton. Firstly, as I have argued, there is never any sense in The Prelude that progress to a higher truth is going to be a linear experience. Secondly, the moment of ease or surmise does itself constitute progress in Wordsworth’s terms and a higher truth of sorts. Brian Nellist has noted that ‘there is an agreement among critics not so much about the poem’s   Newlyn, ‘community in The Prelude’, p. 62.   Newlyn, ‘community in The Prelude’, p. 63. 16   Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 42. 17   Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 52. 18   Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 57. 19   Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca and London, 1973), p. 304. 20   Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven, 1976), p. 13. 14

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meaning as over where its centres of gravity in every way lie’.21 The episode of the discharged soldier is one of these centres of gravity – actually pulling the child Wordsworth into its vortex and forcing language to fill in space – but the spots of time, the crossing of the Alps and the final epiphany on Snowdon immediately spring to mind as similar moments. These are the agreed locations of profundity in the poem, but they accrue value not through their moral purport or the significance of their position within the narrative, as does Satan’s gaze at Eve, but because of the intensity in which they were first experienced and subsequently retold. Newlyn labels all such moments ‘epiphanies’, which suggests reminiscence with Blake’s channelling of Milton in his garden. To a lesser degree, Wordsworth also presents moments that are interpreted from multiple viewpoints or through proliferating language that suggests the adjustment of perception. In The Vale of Esthwaite, as in the opening of The Prelude, ‘the poet … is a man walking through a landscape’.22 Once again it seems true that what the Romantic poets or critics see depends upon where they stand. As Rehder points out, Wordsworth’s is a pedestrian muse (Descriptive Sketches is subtitled a Pedestrian Tour), and like any pedestrian his point of view alters as he walks. In The Vale of Esthwaite the poet witnesses the sunset, another liminal occasion, and finds that his language must adjust itself not only to the sun’s movement but also to his own as he walks along: While in the west the robe of day Fades, slowly fades, from gold to gray, The oak its boughs and foliage twines Marked to the view in stronger lines, Appears with foliage marked to view, In lines of stronger, browner hue, While every darkening leaf between, The sky distinct and clear is seen. (95–102)23

Rehder stresses the poet’s shifting viewpoint, but we can further unpick Wordsworth’s representation of the mind in process. Reading these lines one has the sense that Wordsworth knew almost exactly what he wanted to say about the sunset but that both the scene and the potential of language to enact it got the better of him. Initially the word ‘While’ suggests that the poet was always intending to describe the way the oak is set off by the setting sun and vice versa, but the idiom alters almost immediately from the controlled classical image of the sunset – ‘robe of day’ – to the hesitant, ‘fades, slowly fades’. For Wordsworth the word ‘fades’ isn’t enough, but instead of being removed it is added to in order to show the 21   Brian Nellist, ‘Lyric Presence in Byron from the Tales to Don Juan’, in Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (eds), Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool, 1988), p. 40. 22   Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry, p. 46. 23   William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, vol. 1 (New Haven and London, repr. 1981), pp. 52–3.

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development of the mind’s response to its surroundings. This leads to the description of the oak, but instead of getting a clear picture the reader feels more strongly the sense of the poet’s eye adjusting to the changing light and attempting to see the tree more clearly. The tone is at first definite – ‘its boughs and foliage twines/ Mark’d to the view in stronger lines’ – but the introduction of Appears sounds an uncertain note requiring Wordsworth to readjust his initial choice of words for more accuracy. The lines sound tautological but are in fact precisely constructed to demonstrate the forming of an image. At first the description is almost sufficient, but it needs tweaking to get the nuance exactly right. Wordsworth has all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order. The addition of browner completes the picture as the eye becomes accustomed to greater detail and it seems as if ‘every’ leaf is revealed through which the sky strikes the perceptions both ‘distinct’ and ‘clear’. Ongoing movement whereby the processes of consciousness are rendered is just as important as the choice of the words themselves. Wordsworth’s way of keeping language fresh and vibrant is not then to invoke an endless polysemy, as with Blake, but to show the reader how new associations between language can be constructed and fought for. It is not therefore the case that Wordsworth shows one moment from many viewpoints in The Prelude, as does Blake in Milton, but that he shows many moments that can be read in near identical ways. One of the features of the Wordsworthian epiphany, deriving again from a Protestant sense of election, is that the feeling of inspiration will come repeatedly whether it is looked for or not. When Wordsworth invokes Milton in the ‘Prospectus’, for example, several of the key issues I have identified are at work. The lines are a deliberate secularising of Milton’s transcendent purpose in Paradise Lost and were intended for the culmination of Book one of The Recluse. They consequently hold a privileged position in Wordsworth’s canon and cut against the grain of Paradise Lost: On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of imagery before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed; And I am conscious of affecting thoughts And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes Or elevates the Mind, intent to weigh The good and evil of our mortal state. (1–9)24

Of most importance is not to ascertain exactly what Wordsworth means by ‘Man’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Human Life’ here, as they are abstractions used to cover a variety of bases. What stands out instead is that the ‘trains of imagery’ that the poet will use   Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford and New York, 1936), p. 589. 24

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to tackle the great social themes come frequently upon him in moments of solitude. This is reinforced at the opening of The Prelude as the poet announces ‘should the guide I choose/ Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,/ I cannot miss my way’ (1805, I, 17–19). The regularity of the moment of inspiration is important for Wordsworth. Whereas Byron agonised in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage over the lost ground of his past, Wordsworth maintains the hope for his ‘days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety’ (‘My heart leaps up’, 8–9). The spots of time are continually vivifying points of succour for the imagination. They become, as Jonathan Wordsworth has argued, ‘a link in the chain of development, a portion of … consciousness’.25 This is one of the reasons why I earlier suggested that the singularity of the discharged soldier episode should be questioned. Not for the details of what occurred of course, but because the poet’s response to the occasion (which critics have come to see as the primary point of organisation) is exactly that which we encounter in any other number of scenes in the poem. Like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the incidents of The Prelude could easily be reordered, and indeed frequently were reordered by Wordsworth, and still make the desired impression upon the reader. Paradise Lost is quite opposite therefore to The Prelude in the sense that each crucial moment is a decision that cannot be withdrawn or reconfigured at a later date. The Fall is unique, but the various moments of epiphany in The Prelude are not. They stand in relation to other similar moments that also provide vehicles to represent or approach the workings of the mind. The architecture of the poem is not organised on the basis of action, succession and consequence as is Paradise Lost but on the repetitions of language used to highlight the surmise of transcendence. Recent discussions of sincerity in Wordsworth’s poem are therefore something of a red herring, which becomes apparent when considering the inconsequence of linearity for the Romantic poet. Wordsworth does not of course attempt to record exactly what occurred when he climbed Snowdon or met the discharged soldier – his response in that moment has passed into irretrievable memory, the dark abysm of time. We witness instead a version of what occurred as he argues in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: ‘For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings’.26 The key word here is ‘representatives’. The true linear sequence that has allowed the poet to compose the account of the meeting with the soldier is hidden and could never be fully shown – this would be an impossibility. But what Wordsworth is able to show is a version of how the mind has led him to the manner in which he now writes verse. In this sense sincerity as most critics conceive it could never be part of Wordsworth’s agenda. The ability to conjure versions or ‘representatives’ of the growth of his mind is, nevertheless, at the heart of our experience of The Prelude. By following Rehder and reading the epiphanies of The Prelude as ‘types’ of experience rather than attempts to be sincere, it becomes apparent that Wordsworth’s   Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1982), p. 52.   WW, p. 598.

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poem cannot be organised around the successional model that orders Paradise Lost. The real narrative of the poet’s life is hidden from view but is made present at moments of upsurge where the mind excels itself through its powers of synthesis. This is, to all intents and purposes then, a new brand of narrative to fit the new function of poetry that Burke located in the sublime. Most forms of traditional narrative of course underwhelmed Wordsworth. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he famously objected to ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and the deluge of idle and extravagant stories in verse’.27 While comments like these might seem ostensibly aimed at sensationalism (creating Lamb’s readers against the grain perhaps) they are also indicative of a more important formal issue for Wordsworth and the Romantics. Andrew Bennett has argued that ‘Underlying such attacks is the recognition of a fundamental opposition between the events of narrative and “poetry”. Wordsworth is objecting not simply to sensationalism, to a “degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation”, but to narrative itself’.28 The arbitrary details or actions in stories were for Wordsworth not a route to the ‘perhaps’ of surmise and imaginative nourishment but an impediment. Bennett writes that for Wordsworth ‘the “incidents” of narrative are extraneous to the poem’,29 which supports my reading of the discharged soldier episode in which I emphasised the importance of interpretation and not meaning. He also goes some way to endorsing my reasons for believing Wordsworth could not have wanted to sincerely depict the actions that made him a poet: ‘by implicitly distinguishing between internalised and “external” narrative, Wordsworth is able to distance his own writing from the degraded form of novels and romances’.30 Wordsworth has already internalised his narrative prior to writing and now produces a work which will demonstrate how that narrative or life story has affected him. To try and produce a poem that rendered the growth of the poet’s mind as a traditional ‘external’ narrative would result in a Shandyesque work that would genuinely never get started. Bennett therefore believes, rightly I think, that ‘what both Coleridge and Wordsworth are attempting to do is to negotiate a satisfactory compromise in relation to narrative, to find an altered focus of organisation’.31 The compromise was to place the poet within his own narrative as a figure experiencing the fluctuations of human consciousness. Lyric sensibility is embedded by Wordsworth within narrative verse in order to foreground polysemous poetical interpretation and not continuity. Bennett’s phrasing is apposite for my argument, which has already returned several times to altered focuses of organisation. In order to discuss how that altered Romantic focus specifically relates to Paradise Lost I will turn now to Coleridge.   WW, p. 599.   Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 16–17. 29   Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 19. 30   Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 20. 31   Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 21. 27 28

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Chapter 5

Coleridge

The half is greater than the whole. (Hesiod) some vast and general purpose, To which particular things must melt like snows. (Byron, Cain, II, 314–15)

I Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the great theoriser of the Romantic period and as such allows me to follow more closely in prose what I have argued Wordsworth was doing to Paradise Lost in terms of poetic allusion. That does not mean I will ignore Coleridge the poet in this chapter; I want particularly to explore at further length the issues that surround the role of the interpretive poet in relation to The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, but I take this opportunity to more thoroughly spell out my own argument in relation to Romantic poetic theory. In his Table Talk Coleridge noted the primary attraction of Milton for the Romantic writer: ‘There is a subjectivity of the Poet – as of Milton, who is himself before himself in every thing [sic] he writes’. The concerted performance of ‘Milton’ as a poet within his verse distinguished this brand of creativity for Coleridge from that best represented by Shakespeare: Shakspeare [sic] is the Spinozistic Deity, an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is Presience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery coach and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them. Shakespeare’s poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost.

Coleridge points up two curiously related qualities in Milton the writer. The first is that he appears immanent to everything that occurs within Paradise Lost, guiding the reader along the way as Virgil leads Dante; the second that he stands ab extra, transcendent and aloof. The two features of Milton as poet are not however as contradictory as they may at first seem. They constitute the same idea but expressed  10   CCW, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (2 vols, Princeton, 1990), vol. 14/1, p. 130.  10   CCW, ed. Woodring, vol. 14/1, p. 125.

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in slightly different ways. What is interesting is that Coleridge figures Milton not in terms of the glamorous Satan, as we have seen Burke do implicitly, but as though he had taken on the qualities of the Old Testament God manifested both in transcendence but also immanent to earthly action. The exact expression in fact of Milton’s own God in Paradise Lost who is at one moment described in terms of a blinding unapproachable light and at the next can converse openly with Christ about the fortunes of Satan. The sublime cult of Paradise Lost that we have seen emerge in the eighteenth century had often described Milton as though he were the Christian God of his own poem, and Coleridge meant something related but slightly different. In fact Coleridge is noticeably poeticising and deifying Milton through allusion to the classical story of Phoebus and Phaeton in the Metamorphoses. Ovid describes the relationship between the sun god and his rebellious offspring in a manner which, in terms of the use of light imagery, anticipates that of father and son in Paradise Lost: Here Phaeton still gaining on th’ ascent, To his suspected father’s palace went, ’Till pressing forward through the bright abode, He saw at distance the illustrious God: He saw at distance, or the dazling light Had flash’d too strongly on his aking sight. (24–9)

Coleridge’s metaphor for Milton therefore mixes the authority of Phoebus who drives the chariot of the sun across the sky and the presumption and pride of Phaeton who attempts to usurp his father’s power. It also, through the association of light with both classical and Christian God, mixes the frame of reference, as Newlyn argues, both conferring absolute mastery on Milton and simultaneously imbuing his creativity with the energy of the usurping force captured at the height of his powers (immediately prior as it is to Phaeton’s fall from grace). The figure is well chosen by Coleridge because it emphasises the creative cusp on which Milton has stood for so many – authoritarian on the one hand and daring over-reacher on the other. The primary reason that Coleridge chooses the image of the sun God’s chariot is not however to muddy the waters of interpretation, although this is undoubtedly an accompanying effect that should be acknowledged. Coleridge is first and foremost concerned to impress upon the reader his belief in the subjectivity of a poet who cannot let the reader lose sight of his own mind forming poetry and so being ‘before himself’, just as Wordsworth so often is, throughout his verse. It is no surprise then to find that if any moments, or Romantic fragments, could carry the weight of Milton’s meaning they were, for Coleridge, to be found in the  10   Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. John Dryden and others, ed. Samuel Garth (Ware: Wordsworth, repr. 1998.

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theophanies that open Books three and seven. It is here that readers find Milton dwelling on his purposes as a poet and a man of Christ, allowing insight into the workings of his mind in a manner not unlike that which we have experienced in the writing of Blake and Wordsworth: Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born, Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest The rising world of water dark and deep, Won from the void and formless infinite. Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing, Escap’t the Stygian Pool, though long detain’d In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne With other notes then to th’ Orphean Lyre I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend, Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe, And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou Revisit’st not these eyes, that rowle in vain To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs, Or dim suffusion veiled. (PL, III, 1–26)

While the opening section of Book three rightly reads as a Classical epic invocation to the muse, it is noticeably stamped with the same kind of repetitive urgency that characterised Wordsworth’s description of the discharged soldier or Blake’s depiction of Thel. Milton tentatively poses questions ostensibly to the source of his inspiration – ‘holy light’ – but they have a rhetorical character as well, made apparent in the absence of a literal light that requires the figurative replacement conjured through the poet’s choice of expression. The first three lines become, as a consequence, an inspection of interiority (perhaps of Catherine Belsey’s ‘spectral subjectivity’), and as so often with Milton an interrogation of his own fitness to undertake the mammoth task of epic. The potentially Romantic resonances occur in the internally repetitious lines five and six: ‘Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,/ Bright effluence of bright essence increate’. ‘Dwelt’ prompts its own return

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once Milton has failed to entirely express himself in terms of the origin of holy light in the first half of line five. He goes on to consider the ongoing residence of light in the ‘bright effluence’ of poetic and spiritual inspiration. Language and consciousness are witnessed probing forward into questions that double back on themselves as the echoing words dwelt and bright suggest the chambers of the poet’s mind. But Milton has a theological point to make here – sometimes considered as part of his daring heterodoxy although perhaps he has his tongue in his cheek – that the light of inspiration is complicated in having a determinate origin and yet a continual outflow – both created and cosubstantial with God. The reader witnesses both Milton’s suggestiveness as to how he has firsthand experience of such light and the actual product of this light, which is the verse we are presently reading. But here we must separate generic categories rather than collapse them as Coleridge and Wordsworth, and those who sustain the Romantic legacy of Paradise Lost, would have us do. The difference should be noted that Milton here expresses a choice while Romantic writers choose an expression. While for Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge there is no story but that of the mind, for Milton there is a story to be told exterior to the mind that involves a knowing separation of the manner of telling from the details of events. What Coleridge fails to do is put these lines within their proper generic context. It is equally true with Satan’s strand of the narrative and the scenes in Eden, as Northrop Frye pointed out: ‘The epic narrative thus consists of a foreground action [Satan’s narrative and the Fall of Adam and Eve] with two great flanking speeches [those of Raphael and Gabriel] where the action is reported by messengers (aggeloi) putting it in its proper context’. Without Frye’s ‘proper context’, Paradise Lost becomes a Wordsworthian poem of ideas unfolding, exactly the argument we have seen Gordon Teskey recently revive. But epic verse is a form of narrative, and continuity ought to be paramount. The eye of the lyricist is drawn not only to different but also to competitive imperatives. That is not to argue that conventional narratives eschew liminal or interstitial moments – ‘in order to tell a story a narrative must include description which is, by definition, an interruption of narrative’ – but to point out that stories we would usually label ‘Romantic’ centre on lyrical occasion at the expense of narrative temporality. The motivating factor on Coleridge’s part may initially be the desire to replace verifiable meaning with the multiple meanings that result from pursuing the mind in thought, but it is important to be aware that this emerges from a habit practised primarily by the lyricist. Paradise Lost as an epic becomes formally threatened in such a scenario, as Coleridge explains in his plea for careful reading of the poem:  10   Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto and Buffalo, 1965; repr. 1975), p. 15.  10   Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge, 1994), p. 4.

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I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry are scarcely read at all.

The comments above come from a series of lectures that Coleridge gave on Paradise Lost at the Crown and Anchor in 1819. Noticeably the feature of Paradise Lost to suffer in his appraisal is the story. When it comes to individual episodes in the same series of lectures, Coleridge selects moments in which he can wax lyrical (I use the word in its formal sense) about Milton’s glorious subjectivity. The analysis that Coleridge gives of Eden, for example, recalls the problem that Emerson alerted us to in which aestheticism is pursued at the exclusion of morality: ‘In the description of Paradise itself, you have Milton’s sunny side as a man; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the utmost’. Coleridge continues by separating out Milton’s theological beliefs from his talents as a poet, ‘In the description of Eve, and throughout this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the theologian’. Coleridge considers Milton’s theology to be an aspect that he could leave out if desired, as though the ‘holy light’ were switched off momentarily to allow the really talented poet chance to shine. Coleridge falls into the trap of subtracting parts from the whole that I discussed in my introduction. His reading can only be a misreading that neglects the importance of the opening of Book three that he ironically so admired. The ‘holy light’ of spiritual inspiration is for Milton indivisible from that of poetic inspiration; the two are one and the same, as he repeatedly makes clear. Trying to empty out the theology, or the argument, from the poetry is like trying to separate out the origin of the light of God from its continued presence manifested in Milton as a poet. If we did so Paradise Lost would simply disappear. To recall Bennett’s words in which Wordsworth and Coleridge are viewed as seeking a compromise in relation to narrative poetry, it becomes clear that Coleridge’s remarks about local sections of Paradise Lost can be extended to include more general formal and moral concerns. I believe that Coleridge, like Burke and Wordsworth, was advancing a radical new way in which the narrative of Paradise Lost might be read, one that, whether we agree with it or not, strives against Milton’s authorial grain. Coleridge never openly asserts that Milton’s poetic and theological purposes clash, in fact he emphasises that to pursue this line of reasoning results in the simple-minded reading against the grain that Rajan described as ‘turning the poem upside down’. Coleridge declares that Milton  10   CCW, Essays 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes (2 vols, Princeton, 1987), vol. 5/2, p. 428.  10   R.A. Foakes records them as ‘Unasigned Lecture Notes’, stating, ‘The first part of these notes is now known to belong to Lect 4 of the 1819 series, but there is no reason to connect the rest with this lecture’, CCW, ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 15/2, p. 425.  10   CCW, ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 15/2, p. 428.  10   CCW, ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 15/2, p. 428.

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should actually be admired for unifying the causes of disparate political groups, ‘his Poetry belongs to the whole World/ It is alike the Property of the Churchman and the Dissenter, the Protestant and Catholic, the Monarchist and the Republican – and of every Country on Earth except the kingdom of Dahomy, in Africa, for the present at least’.10 The same goes for the imagination as Coleridge seizes on Milton’s description of unity in Book ten of Paradise Lost as a symbol for Romantic synthesis: ‘By some connatural force,/ Powerful at greatest distance to unite/ With secret amity things of like kind’ (PL, X, 246–8).11 But as I have commented, there is an irony in Coleridge’s ardent emphasis on the synthesising properties of the imagination, when, as regards Paradise Lost, it is achieved by rejecting Milton’s own primary point of synthesis. Seamus Perry has argued that ‘Milton’s role in Coleridge’s literary criticism is to represent the sublime possibility of an entirely internal kind of poetic creativity’, the kind found at the opening of Book three.12 Put simply, Milton was for Coleridge his own hero and his own purpose – a poet who laid stress on the importance of subjective experience and the role of the imagination in drawing those experiences into harmony. If this meant being both immanent and ab extra simultaneously then so be it. Coleridge was not alone in feeling this, although he would use the same criticism to berate Wordsworth for being unable to shift his views sufficiently: ‘when he was fond of characterizing Wordsworth as “spectator ab extra”, he apparently came to regard his inflexibility of attitude as a direct limitation of his genius’.13 With the emphasis falling on what might be called the ‘flexibility’ of Milton, both as the immanent and transcendent poet, it is unsurprising that Coleridge often selects moments of Burkean sublime imprecision for praise. These are of course notable for their transcendence: ‘Milton’s godliness is a form of transcendence, an imaginative superiority to this low world’.14 In an article written for The Courier Coleridge quotes the lines in which Milton likens Satan to a comet: On th’ other side Incensed with indignation, Satan stood, Unterrify’d, and like a Comet burned, That fires the length of Orphinicus huge In th’ arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Strikes pestilence and war. (PL, II, 707–12)

  CCW, Marginalia, ed. H.J. Jackson and George Whalley (5 vols, Princeton, 1992), vol. 12/3, p. 883. 11   Used by Coleridge in The Friend (1818), CCW, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (2 vols, Princeton, 1969), vol. 4/1, p. 471. 12   Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 214. 13   John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959), p. 283. 14   Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 213. 10

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The issue under consideration is that comets were classically associated with ‘divine wrath’, as, for instance, the comet recorded by Suetonius (and later Shakespeare), which supposedly followed the death of Caesar. But Coleridge suggests that the image runs counter to the speculative tradition, ignoring the political and religious significance of the ‘pestilence and war’. Instead he lavishes praise on the vehicle, rather than the tenor, of the simile and its chain of associated images as Burke had done before him. Coleridge foregrounds only the sublime nature of the figure – an investment in aestheticism and also ambiguity, possibly due to the fact that, as Peter Kitson writes, Coleridge was beginning to ‘sense the power of the “symbol”’.15 He goes on to speculate on the mind’s immersion in the light-effects and Milton’s choice of expression, which soothes the mind rather than alerting it to the danger of Satan’s evil: There is however nothing on the appearance of this mysterious stranger ‘in the arctic sky’, that should strike dread. He draws after him a train of beautiful light, resembling in colour and exceeding in lustre the traces of the Milky Way: and we confess, he has impressed our minds with very different feelings from those of fear.16

The immediate impression of the negative sublime (inspiring not fear and dread but comfort) negates the moral significance of Satan’s actions in the context of the narrative. Coleridge again makes the point that Milton’s purpose was not that of his main rhetorical drive – ‘to justify the ways of God to men’ – but the potential within that structure to open up moments of imaginative epiphany. Theorising the practice that underwrites The Prelude, Coleridge implies that there exist moments in narrative that resonate beyond the plot per se and that, when encountered, direct attention away from linearity to a synchronic encounter between reader and poet. In Wordsworthian terms these moments are best evidenced by the spots of time, and in Paradise Lost they are best evidenced by the recital of Milton’s mind contemplating epic. Undoubtedly the descriptions of Satan in Pandemonium can be included as equivalent sublime versions of Miltonic theophany. Characteristically the mind is unable to quite fix itself on a single image. Jan Plug notes that it is Paradise Lost that provides Coleridge with his most potent example of such indeterminate figuration in the characters of Sin and Death: The ‘hovering between images’ of the final lines [of ‘Frost at Midnight’] makes the mediating power not only that of language, but of the imagination, refusing to fix itself on any one image and become understanding. The lines that Coleridge continues to quote in his discussion of this hovering in the Literary Lectures are themselves instructive for they are suggestive of the structure of the figure:   Peter J. Kitson, ‘The Whore of Babylon and the Woman in White’, Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), p. 9, pp. 1–14. 16   Contributions to The Courier (September 12, 1811), in ROM, p. 195. 15

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The other Shape, If shape it may be call’d, that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, Or substance might be call’d, that shadow seem’d, For each seem’d either; … (Lects 1808–19, I, 311) Milton describes a shape or figure that is figureless, a figure that is distinguished by its lack of figuration and that signifies, in the statement ‘each seem’d either’, itself as the ‘shape of a figure’. Imagination, that is, takes on the form of a rhetorical figure, the mirror image of the film, and of the chiasmus.17

It would not be going too far to argue that the hovering that occurs over single words in Coleridge’s reading of Paradise Lost could be translated to the larger scale of the entire narrative. One episode hovers next to another in the Romantic imagination, with no one taking on greater significance than any other – just as I argued that none of Blake’s words attain a hierarchy of meaning – and with linearity relegated behind spatial indeterminacy. Poetic experience is centred for both Coleridge and Wordsworth in the poet’s creative act and not in the actions of characters: ‘In the Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton’s own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness; and this is so truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord’.18 Therefore when Coleridge invokes Paradise Lost in one of his earliest poems, the Greek ‘Ode on Astronomy’ (translated by Robert Southey), it is noticeably Milton’s apostrophe to the holy light of Book three that is paraphrased: ‘Chariots of happy Gods! Fountains of Light!/ Ye Angel-Temples bright!/ May I unblamed your flamy thresholds tread?’19 But the adoption of the Miltonic register, so evident in Coleridge’s juvenilia, suggests the poet’s desire to set himself alongside Milton as a projector of the mind rather than as a man of Christian ethics. At the culmination of the Ode, Coleridge specifically elevates the ‘soul’ of the poet into heavenly company ‘A star amid the starry throng,/ A God the Gods among’. Without a presiding narrative of his own, Coleridge projects the poet into eternity purely through the act of writing poetry. Beer reminds us that the lack of a coherent system of belief meant 17

  Jan Plug, ‘The Rhetoric of Secrecy: Figures of the Self in “Frost at Midnight”’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Fulford and Paley, p. 38, pp. 27–39. 18   CCW, ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 5/2, p. 428. 19   Elsewhere Coleridge’s juvenilia shows thorough familiarity with Paradise Lost. In ‘The Nose: An Odaic Rhapsody’ Coleridge invokes Milton’s Satan: ‘So Satan’s Nose, when Dunstan urg’d to flight,/ Glowing from gripe of red hot pincers dread/ Athwart the smokes of hell disastrous twilight shed’ (28–30), in CCW, ed. J.C.C. Mays (3 vols, 2001), vol. 16/1, p. 17. While in ‘A Lover’s Complaint to his Mistress’, Coleridge invokes the forlorn and wandering Milton returned to his ‘native element’ of Paradise Lost Book seven: ‘With wandering feet to gloomy groves I fly,/ And wakeful Love still tracks my course forlorn’ (3–4), in CCW, ed. Mays, vol. 16/1, p. 66.

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that Coleridge’s own attempts at epic, just like those of the other Romantics, were ordained to fail: ‘The lack of a mythology makes the creation of a sustained work such as epic extremely difficult’.20 Just as Keats’s Hyperion poems suffer from the poet’s lack of a prospective plan, so Coleridge’s narratives tend to stumble against the fact that, as Eric Heller states, by the end of the eighteenth century ‘there is no more commonly accepted symbolic or transcendent order of things’.21 The consequences in Romantic verse, whether they are desired or not, is that the poet becomes ‘the precariously unstable centre of an otherwise unfocused universe’.22 Coleridge’s heavy creative investment in Wordsworth’s The Recluse project is testament to his belief that the height of poetic achievement lay in epic, but this was undermined by subjective experience that is seldom other than fragmentary, partial or intimated: ‘in the sphere of art the symbolic substance, dismissed from its disciplined commitments to “reality”, dissolves into incoherence, ready to attach itself to any fragment of experience, invading it with irresistible power’.23 Not only does the emphasis on the irresistible power of the fragment permeate, for Coleridge, the order of the universe but also, as I have suggested, the order of Paradise Lost. Leslie Brisman picks up this argument in the twentieth century, suggesting that Paradise Lost is a series of moments in which the moral valency of the poem, particularly of the Fall (whether considered fortunate or not), is denied to the reader. The narrative as one might ordinarily appreciate it through temporal transition is replaced by fragmentary points of suspended ethical decision, when ‘The moment of vision captures the temporal ambiguity of a Miltonic moment of choice’ and ‘all is seen in patterned time’.24 Coleridge undoubtedly read Paradise Lost as just such a poetry of verbal ‘exploration’;25 this was not though the way that Milton intended it to be read. Jerome McGann has suggested that the explorative drive is characteristic of Coleridge’s thinking as a whole: ‘Coleridge’s entire Kantian-based theory of poetry, as is well known, depends upon … notions of the autonomy of the poetic event’.26 It seems that Paradise Lost was Coleridge’s supreme example of this poetry of exploration. Beer therefore argues, like Teskey, that for Coleridge, ‘the true poet is, within his finite limitations, a type of God the Creator’, and Coleridge draws constant analogy in his correspondence ‘between poetic creation and the Divine Creation of the Universe’.27

  Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 18.   Eric Heller, The Disinherited Mind: essays in modern German literature and thought (Cambridge, 1952), p. 165. 22   Heller, The Disinherited Mind, p. 165. 23   Heller, The Disinherited Mind, p. 165. 24   Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca, 1978), p. 3. 25   Meg Harris Williams, Inspiration in Milton and Keats (London, 1982), p. 45. 26   McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 70. 27   Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 34. 20 21

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But Coleridge also makes specific connection between Divine Creation and the poetic structure of narrative and epic that complicates his responses to Paradise Lost: The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait [sic] line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion – the snake with it’s Tail in it’s Mouth. Hence indeed the almost flattering and yet appropriate Term, Poesy – i.e., poiesis = making. Doubtless, to his eye, which alone comprehends all Past and all Future in one eternal Present, what to our short sight appears strait is but a part of the great Cycle – just as the calm Sea to us appears level, tho’ it be indeed only a part of a globe.28 [Coleridge’s italics]

The metaphor of the globe allows Coleridge to distinguish between the omniscient knowledge of God and the subjective nature of man’s understanding. For Coleridge, the purpose of narrative verse is to translate the eternal and circular into the temporal and straight, but it is still only a partial understanding of the ‘Universe’. Coleridge’s primary anxiety remains in his self-declared inability to convert the series into the ‘whole’ that would constitute narrative experience: ‘I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little – ! – My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible’.29 Elsewhere, he links the inability to experience more than the Romantic fragment explicitly to Paradise Lost in his wish ‘To have a continued Dream, representing visually and audibly all Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ [italics added].30 For Coleridge, the proof was in the act of writing, which meant not an appeal to a muse in a classical sense but a turn within to explore his own poetic resourcefulness. In this regard he viewed Milton as a kindred spirit: Milton seems to have ended in an indifference, if not a dislike, to all forms of ecclesiastic government, and to have retreated wholly into the inward and spiritual church-communion of his own spirit with the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.31

Here Coleridge remarks again upon the apparent opposition of poetic inspiration and prelature, but this is less important than the characteristically Romantic ‘turn within’, touched on here and so often described in poetic terms as an

28   Letter to Cottle (March 1815), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford, 1987), p. 182. 29   Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.H. Coleridge, (2 vols, London, 1895), vol. 1, p. 228. 30   Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 72. 31   ROM, p. 215.

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inner light.32 It is worth recalling then the opening invocation to Urania in Book one of Paradise Lost: the possible ambiguity of Milton’s verse suggests that his own poetic inspiration may come from his turn within, rather than as a direct result of Urania’s presence, ‘what in me is dark/ Illumine’. For Coleridge, like Wordsworth, this is because Paradise Lost was as much the tale of the poet himself as of Adam and Eve, or a prospectus for future generations. II For a man so persistently dogged by nightmares as Coleridge was, his faith in a ‘turn within’ – in a type of unconscious visionary power – is perhaps surprising. He records one dream vividly in his notebook ‘A most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye & attempting to pull it out’.33 The hinterland between dream and waking, which is characteristic of much of Coleridge’s best verse, is suggested by the brief conclusion ‘When I awoke, my right eye swelled’.34 There is something of the hangover of a dream even in the full consciousness of Coleridge’s verse that plays uneasily about its edges. In the Ancient Mariner, for example, Coleridge spins a nightmarish yarn that resembles a morality tale. Indeed, he retrospectively suggested that the moral of the poem obtrudes too overtly on the reader in a reminiscence of his response to objections by Anna Leticia Barbauld: ‘The fault of the Ancient Mariner consists in making the moral sentiment too apparent and bringing it in too much as a principle or cause in a work of such pure Imagination’.35 In some ways Coleridge seems embarrassed by the fact that revisions to the tale suggested he was groping towards a moral through the character of the Mariner that at best parodied or aped the Christian experience of forgiveness. But he alerts us here to the fact that his original guiding ‘principle’ was the imagination and not morality. Just as Wordsworth made interpretation his focus in The Prelude, so Coleridge stressed the experiential nature of the human imagination in The Ancient Mariner. In the figure of the Mariner we therefore find one of the Romantic period’s most persistent yet defective interpreters. Denise Degrois argues that ‘Only by “re-creating” the sea-snakes in an instant of active contemplation and by liberating speech, will [the Mariner] retrieve a form of identity – that of a 32

  The pattern is first fully explicated by M.H. Abrams but has been discussed more recently by Nicola Zoe Trott, ‘Wordsworth, Milton, and the inward light’, Milton, the metaphysicals, and romanticism, ed. Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 114–35, and Jonathon Shears, ‘Approaching the Unapproached Light: Milton and the Romantic Visionary, in Romanticism and Religion: from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 25–40. 33   Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1989), p. 293. 34   Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 293. 35   CCW, ed. Woodring, vol. 14/1, p. 149.

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compulsive talker’.36 Speech or talking naturally appears less regulated than the written word, something that Coleridge exploits in the Mariner’s story to blur morality with the primary imaginative emphasis. The structural and ethical organisation of the Mariner’s Tale is provided by the rhetorical moment – Degrois’ ‘instant’ – of recollection as the Mariner recounts his story to the Wedding Guest and, just like Milton, undergoes the experience of telling a story. For example, as the Mariner recounts the severity of the icy conditions his choice of expression suggests the performance of hand gestures that come in aid of speech: The Ice was here, the Ice was there, The ice was all around: It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d – Like noises of a swound. (1798, 59–62)37

Immediacy is then generated by the repetitive signification of the words growl’d, roar’d and howl’d as the Mariner tries to conjure the sound of splitting ice through the outcry of a wounded animal. These expressions resemble other noises in a different context – the ‘swound’ – but only find their meaning aurally in suggesting the resonance of the Mariner’s voice. No definitive attribute, even in terms of sound, can be attached to the ice, which is of course not immediately present in the wedding hall. Coleridge uses language to indicate the processes of telling and points to a rhetorical quality in the Mariner’s voice – presumably honed through repeatedly telling the same story. He mediates between a sense that the words flow spontaneously and that they have previously been decided upon. In addition to the pervasive presence of the Mariner’s voice and actions, the reader cannot initially lose sight of the listening wedding-guest either: Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon – The wedding-guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. (1798, 29–32)

Everything is designed stylistically to present the occasion as though it were currently occurring and to bring, as Rehder wrote of Wordsworth, ‘the quick of his thoughts’ to the fore. It follows then that while the symbolic suggestiveness of the killing of the albatross is that man should love all God’s creatures, it is important to recognise that this is only suggestiveness because the tale makes not morality but the kinds of processes that could signify morality its focus. The implied symbolic order is   Denise Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Fulford and Paley, p. 105, pp. 99–109. 37   CCW, ed. Mays, vol. 16/1, p. 376. 36

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absent from the Mariner’s Tale because ‘Small works of art, embodying isolated insights, may be achieved with effect in an unstable imaginative universe, but an extended work needs the mythology which comes only from a stable one’.38 The Mariner’s narrative is governed, in Beer’s words, by an ‘isolated insight’ or an ongoing quest for a frame within which a moral might be revealed. The fact that Coleridge later annotated the poem to include the series of prose guidelines to the action in the margin of the text emphasises the shifting and ideologically unfixed nature of that frame of reference. It is important to add that the gestation of the Mariner was never clearly defined. Richard Holmes notes that one source for the Mariner’s tale came from Coleridge’s childhood reading, the story of Philip Quarll, The English Hermit: ‘One of Quarll’s adventures was the shooting of a sea-bird with a home-made bow, an action he immediately regrets’.39 While this provided the central, and apparently motiveless, action of the Mariner killing the albatross, Holmes records that the morbid character of the ocean came from another source, Crantz’s History of Greeenland, in which two spirits of the ocean, good and evil, are opposed. This is supported by a footnote to ‘The Destiny of Nations’: They call the good spirit, Torngarsuck. The other great but malignant spirit is a nameless female; she dwells under the sea in a great house where she can detain in captivity all the animals of the ocean by her magic power.40

Holmes rightly suspects that ‘Here is the first shadowy outline of the ritual drama of the Mariner himself … doing battle with a “malignant” revenging Spirit of the Deep which pursues his ship’.41 Yet even with the establishment of such sources, the host problem remains that both the wedding-guest and the reader are forced to place faith in the Mariner’s ‘ritual’ of narration. For instance, it is only through the Mariner that we can call the spirit of the sea ‘malignant’. As Peter Kitson comments: ‘we meet a discourse which is heavily concerned with language and its powers to construct in part that reality which it appears to describe’42 – the telling, or language, of the Mariner is the reader’s means of accessing the events that occurred, but can the means be trusted? Degrois believes that the unification of Coleridge’s poetical career lies in ‘one continuous quest for “transparent” expression’43 and that he was an ‘apostle of communication’.44 In this way the Mariner also attempts to order events through language to suggest something of a 38

    40   41   42   43   44   39

Beer, Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, p. 17. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London, 1998), p. 18. CCW, ed. Mays, vol. 16/1, p. 286. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 140. Kitson, ‘The Whore of Babylon and the Woman in White’, p. 14. Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 100. Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 103.

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Christian and redemptive Universe. But, to follow Kitson, it is the words, rather then the events that construct the actual experience. Hence when the Mariner adopts a Christian vocabulary at moments of significant action he lacks the fullness of belief: Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat; And, by the Holy rood A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood. (1798, 488–91)

Rather than invoke or pray to the cross of Christ, the Mariner curses by it: ‘by the Holy rood’. The light effects that animate the dead sailors’ corpses recall Milton’s God, a pattern that John Beer endorses,45 but the light here is hardly Christian, and does not play a part in a Christian narrative, unless we consider the blessing of the water snakes an act equivalent to the sacrifice of Christ. This stretches belief, although Christ-Abel is precisely an identification of the serpent entering Christabel so that she becomes tainted and, simultaneously, the innocent sacrificial victim like Christ on the Cross. There may be, then, a similar identification in the Mariner’s Tale, but it is not an orthodox one or one that has been properly thought through. The most one could say is that a type of baptism could be inferred in the blessing of the water snakes. It is in fact, as Kitson rightly comments, the language (or the Mariner’s act of telling) which suggests any sort of redemptive tale: ‘experience contradicts the language of affirmation’.46 The words used by the Mariner – ‘holy rood’, ‘seraph-man’, even ‘light’ in this context – reach towards a Christian significance – the mythology felt to be lacking by Beer in Coleridge’s thought – but only act as a smokescreen to the actual events of the tale.47 The Mariner is a figure who genuinely writes against the grain of his own text and Degrois is correct to argue that, for the Mariner, identity and purpose is only discovered in the habit of becoming an ‘obsessive talker’ not an obsessive believer. The evolution of The Ancient Mariner and its various incarnations have been described at length by Jack Stillinger and the dominant pattern in the later marginal additions seems to be, as Coleridge wrote to Barbauld, the inference of

45   ‘He apparently saw [light] as a telling emblem of the relationship between God and the creation. The light of the divine, imaged in the sun, goes forth into the universe and works also as an energy, symbolized by the serpent. Energy, however, cannot exist autonomously; it must constantly be connected back to its source if it is to retain its meaning and not degenerate into evil’. 46   Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter, p. 14. 47   The Mariner’s Tale is rather like Coleridge’s version of the Book of Job: ‘It represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation, but seeking about for one’, CCW, ed. Woodring, vol. 14/1, p. 146.

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a moral reading.48 But in making revisions Coleridge seems to have switched the emphasis of the poem from the search for truth to the undermining of that search by deliberately superstitious applications of interpretation. In the 1828 version of the poem the ambiguity surrounding the spirits which animate the bodies of the dead mariners is definitively removed by the Mariner’s own reassurances to the wedding guest. However, the interjections read more like comments directed towards the reader: ‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner!’ Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! ’Twas not those souls that fled in pain, Which to their corses came again, But a troop of spirits blest. (1828, 345–9)

The reader acquires a sense of the control that Coleridge later enacted in the rewriting of much of his verse, but this is perhaps not the same ‘prescience’ that Coleridge admired in Milton. Coleridge seems purposefully to undermine the Mariner’s, and his own, readings of events and prompt the reader to consider ambiguity as the most attractive explanation. Perry, like Levinson, comments that ‘we instinctively place great importance on coherence and unity, in thought and in art’49 and this is no less true of Coleridge than it is of Milton, especially in the way that Coleridge viewed Paradise Lost: ‘The Miltonic imagination is … associated by Coleridge with epic and an idealising unity’.50 Rather than unity, however, Coleridge emphasises the deficiency in any dream he may have held of an organic universal whole or One Life. Instead Perry writes that unity is discovered by Coleridge in Milton through the compensation of an ‘exclusively inner resource, a complete imaginative self-sufficiency of the “I am”’.51 He also confirms my belief that Coleridge did not read Paradise Lost as though it were an epic or even a narrative: ‘To censure egotism “in a Monody or Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round”, Coleridge wrote (PW, II:1144), and Milton’s poem is a monody raised to the status of epic’.52 Perry’s comments contain a curious double standard attributed to Coleridge – the circle and Sonnet are praised for the value inherent in their form, but the narrative/ epic mode of Paradise Lost is considered an extension, and in terms, of another literary mode. 48

  Of the 1817 version, Stillinger comments: ‘Coleridge insists that the reader – another hitherto hidden entity – enters into the interpretation’, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York and Oxford, 1994), p. 71. For full discussion see pp. 60–73. 49   Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, p. 1. 50   Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, p. 211. 51   Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, p. 214. 52   Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, p. 214.

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I would suggest that the formal ramifications of pursuing an alternative reading paradigm to Milton are exerting here a pressure in the relationship between the Mariner’s Tale and Paradise Lost. The primary structural feature of the Mariner’s Tale is, like The Prelude, first and foremost lyrical. Of course the poem is explicitly presented as a lyric, being the first poem in the Lyrical Ballads. But the significance for my argument is that the narrative is prey to a moment of interpretation on the Mariner’s part, which indicates the same foregrounding of interpretation and demand for an interpreter that I identified as a feature of Blake and Wordsworth’s verse: ‘the configuration of the moving present is always altering an inconsistently remembered past’.53 Degrois writes that: Coleridge has left us not only expressions of a (so called) ‘romantic’ ascent towards organic unity in the process of acquiring living knowledge, but also the representation of a fragmented universe, not unlike some present day world views. In many respects, Coleridge is not so far from thinkers who, like Michael Serres, define ‘islands’ or ‘archipelagoes’ of knowledge.54

In the case of the Mariner’s Tale, the reader is marooned on just such a postmodern island of representation.55 The Mariner’s Tale is a poem wholly unlike Paradise Lost in the sense that it cannot be properly read against the grain. It cannot be deconstructed because nothing coherent has been initially constructed. The interpretations of the Mariner are only a pseudo-construct that has already been undermined in the writing. Coleridge’s apparent structure of a morality tale gives way under the pressure of the imagination’s hunger for indeterminacy – the poem’s arctic waters are neither malevolent nor benevolent but deliberately unfixed in meaning. In the case of Coleridge, then, we are right to focus our attention on the role of ambiguity that he discovered, like Burke before him, in the images of Paradise Lost:

  Brian Nellist makes this point of the narrative of Byron’s Childe Harold, but I think his words also apply well to the Mariner’s Tale. Nellist, ‘Lyric Presence in Byron from the Tales to Don Juan’, in Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (eds), Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool, 1988), pp. 39–77, p. 41. 54   Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 107. 55   McGann supports this view of Coleridge: ‘From Mill to Arnold to Mannheim, Trilling, and their successors, theories of ideology can be traced back to the models developed by Coleridge (and his German counterpart Hegel). In this line of analysis, ideology is marked by “false consciousness” and “error” because ideas are time and place specific and hence represent, in their successive points of view, “insulated fragments of truth.” To understand the historicity of knowledge and belief is to have a higher self-conscious grasp of one’s received intellectual traditions’, McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 7. 53

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I dare not pronounce such passages as these to be absolutely unnatural, not merely because I consider the author a much better judge than I can be, but because I can understand and allow for an effort of the mind, when it would describe what it cannot satisfy itself with the description of, to reconcile opposites and qualify contradictions, leaving a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images.56

As the issue of hovering recurs here, the priority of the middle imaginative state of mind, explains the ethical paradox that ‘Coleridge … contrives a Mariner who seems to be both fully redeemed and wholly condemned’.57 As Degrois asserts, ‘Coleridge has tried to extend and revive human communication beyond metaphysical “fixities and definites”, hoping to reconcile opposites in the “shadow” of the “dome of pleasure” reflected in the waves of the “sacred river”’.58 To paraphrase the argument of Newlyn once again: the imagination achieves suspension in a subtle kind of third way through refusing to make a moral decision, a point that Coleridge himself makes directly: ‘As soon as it [the mind] is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination’.59 While imaginative, rather than ethical, response to transgression is foregrounded in The Ancient Mariner, it is appropriate that Degrois also draws our attention to Kubla Khan, because a similar problem exists in the shorter poem. Bernard Beatty describes Coleridge’s representation of imaginative transgression like this: ‘our poise probably depends upon taking punishment and redemption as selfcancelling polarities within imagination’s other world where we might also find, similarly intense yet neutralized, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”’.60 Coleridge’s visionary fictions in the Mariner’s Tale and Kubla Khan allow such contraries to co-exist in a way that a moral structuring of experienced punishment and redemption would not. Coleridge’s suspension of ethical decision, the kind that Brisman mistakenly attributes to Paradise Lost, has the ability to sustain such a paradox. But, the difficulty lies in the vast difference between Milton’s purposes and those of Coleridge and of Romanticism in general. Kubla Khan is one of Romanticism’s central Fragment Poems and, as such, ‘is about Romantic poetry, and the special features of certain Romantic ideological pursuits (both stylistic and conceptual)’.61 McGann is right to draw our attention here to the special relationship between style and ideology in Romantic writing, 56   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (2 vols, London, 1930; repr. 1960), vol. 2, p. 103. 57   Beatty, ‘Ficton’s Limit and Eden’s Door’, in Beatty and Newey (eds), Byron and the Limits of Fiction, p. 2. 58   Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 109. 59   Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, vol. 2, p. 103. 60   Beatty, ‘Fiction’s Limit and Eden’s Door’, p. 3. 61   McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 100.

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because the one encapsulates the other. Kubla Khan is a fragmented reading experience, asserting its own self-contained partiality at the same time that it hints that it is part of a larger narrative poem. Although the poem exists as an extant visionary piece, the style evokes the balladry of Christabel, ‘But oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!’ (12–13).62 Rhetorically the poem evokes the mood of a romance, even building suspense, in this case through apostrophe.63 Karl Kroeber makes a related point, ‘were it not for one or two faint suggestions of a story the lyric would be satisfactory and understandable merely as the description of a vividly pictorial dream’.64 The difficulty in reading the poem, however, is the presence of enough hinting that the fragment is the key to a larger and more clearly defined narrative. More than this, as McGann comments, Kubla Khan ‘operates through symbols because both its subject matter and its style are “ideal”’.65 The problem with this reading returns me to the earlier discussion of Coleridge’s lack of a mythology. The symbols require a verifiable referent, which Coleridge, like Blake, simply does not have. The referents in Kubla Khan, and also the Mariner’s Tale, are so discreet as to be invisible. The immediate threat to the re-creation of Kubla’s pleasure dome, that paradise within, is therefore simply intelligibility – the lack of an appropriate symbolic order undermines the poem by forcing all its reference points towards that which is held within but unexpressed. I am not denying or rejecting the merits of lyric poetry – ‘The despair which characterizes works of this sort should not be read as a mark of artistic weakness’66 – but I am arguing that they are confused by Coleridge with the structure of narrative in the case of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, meaning that both pieces depend upon the isolated poet’s ability to turn his vision into words whilst still claiming an authority that is both unified and objective. Degrois comments that critics have become ‘increasingly aware of Coleridge’s lacunae, unfinished chapters, or metaphorical substitutions blocking the way to the transparent communication of knowledge. However justified, these necessary reassessments should not obliterate the obstinacy of Coleridge’s consciously oscillating quest’.67 Yet McGann is likewise correct to point out that ‘an additional emphasis is placed upon the poem’s conceptual investments, since the central Idea

  CCW, ed. Mays, vol. 16/1, p. 513.   Karl Kroeber argues that lines 15 and 16 (‘As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman wailing for her demon lover’) point to a suggestion of incompleteness: ‘whose echo of a specific ballad tale mingles with suggestions of a paradise story (the mingling strengthened by the “damsel … singing of Mount Abora”)’. Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison, Milwaukee and London, 1966), pp. 54–5. 64   Kroeber, Romantic Narrative Art, p. 55. 65   McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 101. 66   McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 107. 67   Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 109. 62 63

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towards which the imagination gestures is a place of ultimate resort’.68 I would go further than McGann and argue that Coleridge hints that the ultimate resort is an attainable state – the glorious but ultimately futile quest does not necessarily need to be substituted for any quantifiable goal. Coleridge suggests that if the poet could find the right language then the vision would be complete and, as Degrois reminds us, Coleridge’s lifelong passion was to attain the ‘one word to express a one act of feeling’.69 Critics are divided over the success of Kubla Khan. Beer writes that ‘Kubla Khan is, for all its merits, a tragic poem, and a focusing point of all that was unsatisfactory in its author’.70 McGann comments that it ‘is a great Romantic poem which in the end affirms Coleridge’s basic ideology of poetry and the power of the creative imagination’.71 Both are right, because the poem is a record of imaginative gain realised through interpretative loss. Yet, whilst this is entirely appropriate to Kubla Khan, the same cannot be said of Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve are punished. Coleridge’s inchoate reading of Milton’s epic promotes partial and lyrical experience, when the poem’s intelligibility depends on the ordered metaphysics of Milton’s complete story. The fountain that runs through Kubla’s domain significantly lies ‘within’: ‘in “Kubla Khan” that inward creative fountain is the centre of the Khan’s domain and the source of its richness, and the poem represents itself as a spontaneous expression of a congruent inner vision’.72 But, the inner vision also contains a submerged reference to Paradise Lost, or more particularly to the poet Milton within Paradise Lost. Milton describes his own ‘inner vision’ of God at the opening of Book three as a ‘fountain’, recalled, as we have seen, by Coleridge in his ‘Ode on Astronomy’. But in Kubla Khan, Milton himself becomes the ‘fountain of light’, a poetic light divided from its theological origin whereby the moral is thrown out for the aesthetic. Coleridge thereby reads against the grain of the narrative of Paradise Lost through creating his own partially realised narratives. Behind the fragmentary form of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan lies Milton; a subjective, indefinable yet irrefutable presence, in whom Coleridge found a fountain of light shining inward and authorising his own adherence to poetic, not religious, experience.

68

    70   71   72   69

McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 103. Degrois, ‘Coleridge on Human Communication’, p. 103. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 279. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 102. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 102.

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Interchapter

Exploring the Metaphor Before moving on to the second-generation Romantics, I think it would be useful here to examine in more detail the etymology of the expression ‘reading against the grain’. It seems appropriate to do so because the phrase has a history that is particularly appropriate to the study of Paradise Lost – one in which Milton himself has a prominent place. Two ultimate sources are given by the OED. The first derives from the texture of animal hide, the second from the process of dyeing and the colour of dye. The first recorded instance of the word ‘grain’ used in the latter sense is in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas: ‘his robe is lyk scarlet in grayn’ (727).10 Milton also uses grain in this sense in Il Penseroso: ‘All in a robe of darkest grain’ (33). This usage recedes, however, as natural material texture replaces dyed fabric as the dominant literal meaning. Michael Drayton, in 1612, is notable for applying the word specifically to leather: ‘The staple deepe and thicke, through, to the very graine’, but the OED states that ‘grain’ gradually comes to mean the ‘texture of any substance; the arrangement and size of its constituent particles, appearing in an exposed surface or in a cross-cut or fracture’. It suggests that Milton uses the word in this sense in Comus, related specifically to human flesh. Comus, in tempting Lady Alice, argues ‘It is for homely features to keep home,/ They had their name thence; coarse complexions/ And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply/ The sampler, and to tease the housewife’s wool’ (747–50). A variety of physical materials have a grain, not only wood but also stone and metal. The grain is usually internal, only exposed when, as the OED records, the substance is taken in a cross-section. Spenser, in the Shepherd’s Calendar (February, 203), is notable for an early use of grain in reference to wood, but he appears to suggest the outer surface rather than inner structure: ‘The Axes edge did oft turne againe, As halfe unwilling to cut the grain’. Seemingly the word applied to both external features and intrinsic substance. One further literal definition – in common modern usage but with only one entry in the OED – is worth noting. This is provided by a cookery book in  10   The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1987), p. 213.  10   MSP, p. 141.  10   OED, grain. n¹, III, 13, a, 1612, DRAYTON, Poly-olbion, xiv, 233.  10   OED, III, 14.  10   Although John Carey defines this use of ‘grain’ in its earlier meaning of ‘colour’, MSP, p. 214.  10   Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1970; repr. 1991), p. 425.

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1591 and refers to the internal composition of roast meat: ‘Take venison and cut it as the graine goeth’. Current culinary opinion in Britain is that meat should always be carved against the grain. One website offers this advice on how to carve lamb: ‘Some people prefer to carve along the grain, as is common practice in Europe, where lambs are generally smaller at the time of butchering; partisans of this approach like the look of the longer slice. The only drawback is that if the lamb in question is domestic (and thus larger than the European animal), an along-the-grain slice will tend to be tougher than a slice carved against the grain would be’. The first figurative use of the word ‘grain’ in reference to dye occurs, appropriately enough for the present book, in Milton’s The Reason of Church Government (1642): ‘By this is seene … whose virtue is of an unchangeable graine, and whose of a slight wash’. The word was clearly one that featured regularly in Milton’s vocabulary to signify proper moral orientation as, in the previous year, he writes in Of Prelatical Episcopacy: ‘All men would readily have seen what grain the testimony had bin of.10 The word appears to take on the figurative meaning of moral character or temperament in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Milton is recorded as the first writer to transfer the sense in both the case of dye and texture. The movement to the figurative meaning of ‘Quality, nature, temper, inclination, tendency’ was no doubt a natural progression in this case from the signification of the interior of physical substance. The ultimate derivation of the expression ‘Readers Against the Grain’, in which Charles Lamb uses ‘grain’ to signify temper, must then be Milton. The OED defines the phrase ‘against the grain’ in Lamb’s sense as ‘against (also, contrary to) the grain; contrary to one’s disposition’.11 The first use of the full expression is made as early as 1650: ‘O this goes against the grain, this cannot be indured’.12 There is, however, an earlier recorded usage of a similar phrase employed in exactly the same way – ‘against the hair’ (1621) – which further strengthens the link between the figurative meaning and the literal derivation from animal hide. Dryden uses the expression in Love Triumphant: ‘It goes against the grain to give it them’,13 and Sir Walter Scott uses it in a Journal entry: ‘I have dawdled and written letters sorely against the grain all day’.14 But the closest use to my own is made by Tennyson in the lyric ‘Love thou thy land’, in which the grain distinctly refers to ‘Prejudice: ‘Cut Prejudice against the grain’ (22).15 This is the use of grain that I have so far applied to Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge in which  10   OED., grain. n¹, III, 15, 1591, A.W. Bk. Cookrye, 206.  10   www.epicurious.com/g_gourmet/g02_techniques/lamb.html  10   OED., grain. n¹, III, 11, 1641, MILTON, The Reason of Church Government (1851), 132. 10  OED, III, 16, a, 1641, MILTON, Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1851), 80. 11  OED, III, 16, b. 12  OED, III, 16, b, 1650, T. HUBBERT, Pill. Formality, 65. 13  OED., grain.n¹, III, 16, b, 1694, DRYDEN, Love Triumphant, V. wks, (1884), VIII, 462. 14   The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972), p. 172. 15   The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969), p. 614.

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reading against the grain is the process of countering ethical persuasion with the imagination.16 Tennyson’s use broadens the expression from cutting against the grain of individual temperament to reading against the grain of the ethical position of another – undoubtedly the primary site of readings made against the grain of Paradise Lost in the Romantic period. The etymology of the expression is also appropriate, however, in thinking through the metaphor’s applicability to the formal readings that I have described so far. The grain of wood, or an equivalent physical substance, is the integral feature of its material form – in a tree the concentric circles mark the stages in growth in a way not dissimilar to the progression of events in a narrative. We have seen Coleridge make a related point about the structure of narrative: ‘The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert the series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion – the snake with it’s Tail in it’s mouth’.17 Whilst not directed to the same concentric structure as the tree’s rings, Coleridge nevertheless likens the straight to the circular. Narrative has a circularity of sorts, distinct from the progression of a life, in that aesthetic time does not move forward after the death of the story or the final word on the page. Take the ‘tale’ from the snake’s mouth, or a ring from the tree, and the integrity of the whole has been altered. This is reading against the grain. Equally, the ‘cross-cut or fracture’ defined by the OED functions as a metaphor for formal misreading. In this case ‘grain’ should be considered not as the surface of the fracture, but as the integrity of the substance itself, the ‘constituent particles’. On these terms, taking a cross-section of a plank of wood, for example, necessitates making a lateral cut through the visible horizontal grain. In the case of a stick of rock this would make no significant difference to the message running through the middle as it is uniform – all the letters of Blackpool are present all the way through. But the grain of wood when seen in cross-section differs markedly depending on where the cut is made. As the grain curves and coils on the horizontal axis, the lateral axis will narrow or widen accordingly. There is therefore no one dominant or representative cross-section to a length of wood. To relate this to the narrative of Paradise Lost, no one moment can be elected as dominant without cutting against the grain – reading on a lateral axis. Interestingly, the metaphor works doubly well, in that ‘lateral’ applies as much to thought, especially the imagination, as it does to physical space. The lateral reading against the grain of Paradise Lost is frequently privileged for its imaginative reworking of the ethics of narrative. Terry Eagleton amongst others has used the expression in this way to define the kind of misreadings that 16

  Tennyson is not the first to apply the expression to prejudice: ‘That which seems … more against the grain of common prejudice’, OED., grain.n¹, NORRIS 1691–1701, Ideal World, II, xii, (1704), 514. 17   Letter to Cottle (March 1815), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford, 1987), p. 182.

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privilege creative criticism over that often called primary or tautological: ‘What creates the intense pleasure of not knowing?’ We could answer Keats’s question as regards narrative verse – reading against the grain creates this pleasure. The lateral, or imaginative, reading cuts against the ethics of ‘knowing’; knowing that Adam and Eve fell through a misguided act of the human will, although they were free to obey God, and that Satan did likewise. Knowing these facts may well cramp the Romantic imagination, but they are the dominant and definable theological tenets on which the grain of Paradise Lost is founded.

Chapter 6

Byron

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. (Baruch Spinoza) Wearied of sinning, wearied of repentance, Wearied of self, I turn, my God, to Thee (Christina Rossetti, ‘For thine own sake, O my God’)

I Byron’s reading of Paradise Lost differs from that of the first generation Romantics and puts the lie to the belief that all Romantic writers sought to privilege indeterminacy for its own sake. Nevertheless there are elements of Byron’s verse that reveal his reading of Paradise Lost ran counter to Milton’s formal and ethical grain. It seems that the point at which Byron differed in opinion from other Romantic writers was in his sustained interest in the narrative of Paradise Lost, including the argument. In Byron’s case we should consider a challenge to the ethics of Paradise Lost that accounts for epic form and makes itself apparent through the use of other poetic forms. In a famous letter to his publisher, John Murray, Byron wrote that ‘In my mind, the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth’. Byron had a strong sense of moral truth as it might be understood in daily life, unlike other Romantic writers for whom moral language bears a special relation to morality as customarily understood. The reader would be right to make a distinction in Byron’s thought between this moral truth and a variety of uninformed and ill-judged moralising. It is interesting here that Byron continues by rejecting, as did Wordsworth, the theme of Paradise Lost: ‘Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances’. Byron’s declared reasons for approaching Paradise Lost with caution, and indeed his conceptions of moral truth, could not be further removed from those of Wordsworth. As I have argued, Wordsworth and Coleridge read Paradise Lost in a lyrical way, substituting imaginative epiphany for the flow in time.  10   Wittreich, ROM, p. 519.  10   Wittreich, ROM, p. 159.

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Wordsworth consequently rejected or disregarded the fact that Paradise Lost is a narrative poem, an epic, whilst also being an argument. But when Byron considers Milton’s argument, it is more explicitly in terms of his sensitive subject matter. Byron, in his own verse, specifically avoids that which he declares to be ‘beyond human powers’ – the keynote I would argue in considering his response to Paradise Lost, but also his poetic philosophy as a whole. Byron was markedly sensitive to the fact that Paradise Lost should be read, first and foremost, as an argument, and that it is a moral rather than an imaginative work. But he was also clear that this imposed a limitation on Milton beyond the frequently noted problems of verisimilitude. What seems to bother Byron most is Milton’s assumption of the role of God, or rather the implicit link between poet and Creator with a capital ‘C’ that Coleridge and later Gordon Teskey have been content to conflate: ‘The author is a creator and Milton associates himself with the archetypal creator, God’. For Byron, Milton makes something of an ethical transgression: ‘He shocks the severe apprehensions of the Catholics, as he did those of the divines of his day, by too great a familiarity with heaven, and the introduction of the Divinity himself’. This is exactly what Byron is at pains to avoid in Cain, and the reason that characterisation of God is excluded from the mystery. The furthest to which Byron will stretch is the introduction of the Angel of the Lord, and it is this character who speaks the admonishing lines from Genesis: ‘Where is thy brother Abel?’ (III, i, 468) Byron purposefully states: ‘I have avoided introducing the Deity, as in Scripture, though Milton does, and not very wisely either’. Equally, in The Vision of Judgment, in which Byron satirises Southey’s depiction of heaven, any direct portrayal of God is avoided. Byron stops with Southey’s cartoon interview with the archangel Michael and George III entering through God’s gates with thanksgiving. When Byron heard the conservative response to Cain, he seems to have been genuinely shocked at the allegations of blasphemy, especially having taken measures not to attempt to draw God. Medwin’s remembrances of Byron’s response to the adverse criticism are related to Paradise Lost, and significantly emphasise the difference between Byron’s reading and that of Wordsworth: ‘If “Cain” be blasphemous, “Paradise Lost” is blasphemous; and the words of the Oxford gentleman, “Evil be thou my good!” [IV, 110] are from that very poem,  10   Wordsworth notes such a difficulty (in reference to PL, XI, 247): ‘Will it be hypercritical to remark that as the Angel came in a human shape this could not be the identical sword of Michael given him from the armoury of God’, ROM, p. 107.  10   John T. Shawcross, With Mortal Voice: The Creation of Paradise Lost (Lexington, 1982), p. 1.  10   Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton, 1966), p. 77.  10   Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (7 vols, Oxford, 1980–93), vol. 4, p. 292.  10   Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 130n.

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from the mouth of Satan, – and is there any thing more in that of Lucifer, in the Mystery? “Cain” is nothing more than a drama, not a piece of argument’. I would suggest that the corollary of this statement is perhaps the most significant point. Byron distinguishes between his own Cain as a drama and Paradise Lost as an argument as Wordsworth chooses not to. Byron suggests that poetry, specifically narrative verse, is characterised as much by its transitions as it is by Romantic lyrical epiphanies: ‘poetry is generally good – only by fits and starts – and you are lucky to get a sparkle here and there. You might as well want a Midnight all stars as rhyme all perfect’. What becomes clear is that Milton was, for Byron, courting controversy and risking blasphemy in attempting to present God in verse and also to argue God’s case in a poetic argument. This is not to say that Byron read against the ethics of the narrative, if we take Milton to be, in general terms, a proponent of free will. Indeed the opposite is most probably true, as Byron himself states: ‘The opinions of that truly great man, whom it is the present fashion to decry, will ever be received by me with that deference which time will restore to him from all’.10 As we will see, free will is the single most important factor for the Byronic hero. But the primary point to be made is that Byron did not read against the narrative, and therefore moral, grain of Paradise Lost in the formal way that Blake and Wordsworth appear to. There is, of course, an absence of any stated argument in both Cain and The Vision of Judgement, but this is not motivated by a desire to reorder Milton’s moral universe, or his epic poem, so much as a felt sense that knowledge of the Deity and His purpose is, and should remain, ‘beyond human powers’. To paraphrase, Byron read not against the ethics of Milton’s argument but, rather, against the presumption that led to such an attempt. The primary difference between Byron and Wordsworth is that the former did not advocate the suspension of all moral decision, and his reading of Paradise Lost seems to have been, in part, a reaction to this Wordsworthian version of the poem. Jerome McGann is right to distinguish Byron from Wordsworth on ethical grounds: ‘English moralists … refuse to embrace their corporeality – Southey and Wordsworth are their poetic equivalents – and hence they miss their humanity. Byron seeks to mediate these attitudes with a more comprehensive view’.11 But what constituted Byron’s more comprehensive view? If Byron did not advocate the imaginative deferral of ethical decision, the Byronic hero is nevertheless a figure who characteristically resists definitive judgement. Byron also seems to invite readers to judge his characters whilst simultaneously complicating such judgement – Julia is wrong to seduce Juan, for example, but we sympathise with her because of her circumstances. The role that circumstances play in transgression  10   Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 130n.  10   ROM, pp. 518–19. 10   Reply to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1819), in ROM, p. 518. 11   Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago and London, 1968), p. 297.

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is perhaps the consistent recurring theme in Byron’s prose discussions of crime and punishment: We are all the creatures of circumstance … the greater part of our errors are caused, if not excused, by events and situations over which we have little control; the world see the faults, but they see not what led to them: therefore I am always lenient to crimes that have brought about thir [sic] own punishment, while I am little disposed to pity those who think they atone for their own sins by exposing those of others, and add cant and hypocrisy to the catalogue of their vices [Byron’s italics].12

In terms of Paradise Lost, Byron’s emphasis on circumstance would seem to again imply the appropriate relation of narrative events and not the abstraction of imaginative moments. The transgressions of Adam and Eve and Satan are understood in the context of the epic narrative. Suitably, though, the qualification, ‘if not excused’ introduces an uncertainty. Byron’s views are complex – he treads a fine line between considering the part played by the circumstances surrounding a crime and by the act of will through which it also occurs. With typical inscrutability, he refuses to draw a proper distinction between the two, although if the weight falls anywhere it is on the misplaced act of will. If Byron reads against the ethical grain of Paradise Lost, then, it is slightly different from Wordsworth’s misreading. Byron was uncomfortable with Milton’s attempts to argue God’s corner, but was nonetheless fascinated by the act of the will which led to the Fall – an ethical rather than imaginative transgression. Responsibility for such an act may, for the Byronic hero, be definitively claimed or rejected, but the issue can never be as clear-cut as Satan’s claim to be the author of his own bad deeds. Significantly, it is Milton’s God who establishes this theological point in Paradise Lost – ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’ (PL, III, 99) – and Byron makes the decision never to draw the Deity. Byron indicates, and it is frequently borne out by his verse, that his poetry lacks what we could call an overt moral grain, at least as I have described it at work in Paradise Lost. As I will argue, this is probably the main problem that Southey had with Byron’s poetry. Partly this declared lack of grain is the result of Byron wishing to keep his verse free from any comfortable identification with a specific theological position. But it is also due to Byron foregrounding, not exactly negative capability, for moral judgements have to be made, but material whose ambiguities and inherent conflicts have been emphasised because this is what makes them narratives and dramas. With Byron, unlike Keats, we do not enter into an aesthetic world cut off from ethics but enter aesthetically into the difficult and tangled terrain in which ethical judgements still have to be made. Equally, it is true that Byron was particularly chary, at least in theory, of passing personal judgement   Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton, 1969), pp. 77–8. 12

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(itself a Christian point of view), although, once again, his opinions are not uniform on the matter. Consistently suspicious of self-licensed arbitration, not only in Paradise Lost, Byron is nevertheless always prepared to tackle cant and hypocrisy in the public and political arena. In Byron’s early satirical pieces, for example, the critiques can be sustained and wounding. He retracted much of his satire at a later date, even feeling embarrassed by his attacks on Wordsworth and Coleridge, but there is much to take seriously in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Byron’s comment is particularly hostile towards Jeffrey, whose Edinburgh Review had been less than complimentary to his Hours of Idleness. We should pay less attention to the various merits of his targets (as is now known, Brougham actually wrote the unflattering article) than the nature of the satire itself. 13 In a similar vein to his comments on cant, Byron objects to the ‘self-constituted judge[s] of poesy’ (62) in both the Tory Anti-Jacobin and the more liberal Edinburgh Review: ‘Believe a woman or an epitaph,/ Or any other thing that’s false, before/ You trust in critics’ (78–80). Byron characterises the ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’ as a ‘Hydra’ in the preface to the second edition. He also, in a Romantic turn, objects to derivative opinions, both in Reviewers – ‘Critics all are ready made./ Take hackney’d jokes from Miller, got by rote,/ With just enough of learning to misquote’ (64–6) – and in Bards: ‘Affect a candour which thou canst not feel’ (375). It is perhaps only the spiked tone which separates English Bards and Scotch Reviewers from the more poised satire of The Vision of Judgement (1822). The focus of his charge remains the same – self-constituted arbitration. Byron attacks the mean-spirited journalism of the Scotch Reviewers: A mind well skilled to find or forge a fault; A turn for punning, call it Attic salt; To Jeffrey go be silent and discreet, His pay is just ten sterling pounds per sheet: Fear not to lie, ’twill seem a sharper hit; Shrink not from blasphemy, ’twill pass for wit. (67–72)

Jeffrey’s hack is depicted in a series of charges, which gradually build from simple destructive fault-finding, to the ‘forging’ of faults, through outright lies, and finally to blasphemy. Byron is careful to also include the indicting additional sin of venality. But, more than anything, his satire concerns, as the title would suggest, judgement. Byron compares Jeffrey with his namesake, the ‘hanging’ judge, and mockingly offers him his rope, ‘This cord receive, for thee reserved with care,/ To wield in judgement, and at length to wear’ (458–9). It is interesting that when Byron later rephrases this attack, he alludes to Satan as sanctioning this 13

  ‘His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water’, Henry P. Brougham, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review (February 1808), in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London, 1970), p. 27.

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‘spirit’: ‘given the spirit to the world again,/ To sentence letters as he sentenced men’ (442–3). Although, Byron does not refer specifically to Milton’s Satan here, it is not stretching the point too far to believe that Byron also had in mind Satan as another self-constituted judge operating out of Pandemonium. What is certain is that judgement, or more specifically unemotional and incomplete adjudication, is again placed by Byron in the foreground. Byron did not desire a pacific retraction of all curses, à la Shelley’s Prometheus, but the appreciation of the care with which judgement ought to be made. Judgement, when applied in a narrow or ignorant fashion, is described as being Satanic in spirit. The pernicious Satanic spirit is also characterised by cant, and, for Byron, the worst exponent of such cant was Southey. In Southey’s poem A Vision of Judgement, written as a eulogy for George III in 1821, the poet laureate conceptualises the monarch’s judgement before God and subsequent entrance into heaven. His Preface is, however, concerned with another sort of judgement. In defending his innovative choice of metre, Southey demands the reader’s maturity and patience: ‘Would that this literary intolerance were of a saner judgement, and regarded the morals more than the manner of composition; the spirit rather than the form!’14 [my italics] Whether the moral can actually be separated from the form is an important issue, not least for Paradise Lost. Southey addresses his chosen metre but, as I have already argued, the form, particularly the narrative features, of Paradise Lost seem vital for an accurate establishment of meaning. Remove the significance of Milton’s story (and therefore the argument) and the poem can no longer be read with the grain of formal intent. Byron, unlike Southey, seems to have been alert to the fact that the narrative form, as much as Milton’s spiritual beliefs, was an essential guide to the meaning of Paradise Lost. As to Milton’s held theological views, Byron, in this instance, defers comment: ‘I should be very curious to know what his real belief was. The “Paradise Lost” and “Regained” do not satisfy me on this point’.15 Southey’s conservative politics were all too clear, however, in what is essentially poetic dogma. Interestingly, in his Preface, Byron rephrases his comments on Paradise Lost: ‘The reader is also requested to observe, that no doctrinal tenets are insisted upon or discussed; that the person of the Deity is carefully withheld from sight, which is more than can be said for the Laureate, who hath thought proper to make him talk, not “like a school-divine,” but like the unscholarlike Mr. Southey’.16 Southey assumes the role of God or rather, and much worse than Paradise Lost, God is made to sound like Southey. In considering Byron’s most sustained and successful satirical work, it is important to realise that Byron responds not only to a poem but also to the personal 14   Robert Southey, Preface to A Vision of Judgement (1821), in The Poetic Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (10 vols, London, 1845), vol. 10, p. 203, pp. 195–212. All references to the poem and Preface are from this edition throughout. 15   Medwin, Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 78. 16   BW, vol. 6, p. 311.

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attack contained in Southey’s Preface. It is the response to the latter which makes The Vision of Judgement such a triumph, and so much more than one side in the poets’ bickering. Infamously, Southey equates the despicable Byronic temper, an evil that is explicitly political and moral, directly with Milton’s Satan: The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.17

Southey contends that Byron (and to a lesser extent Shelley) represent a band of immoral and licentious poets, whose primary purpose was to provoke offence in the reading public. Of course, Southey’s comments are known to be hyperbolical, possibly even scandalous. Byron stands out as a man and poet extremely concerned with the proper exercise of ethical judgement. But what really irritated Southey about Byron’s verse was Byron’s refusal, as he himself confirms, to offer an identifiable and paraphrasable moral grain outside his early satire. It is noticeable that although Southey links Byron to Satan, Milton himself is not implicated in the attack: ‘Would that [judgement] were directed against those monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first been polluted!’ [my italics]. Southey felt that Milton’s Satan was neutralised by the context of Paradise Lost but that in Byron’s case the argumentative framework was absent. Rather than being uninformed, Southey makes quite a perceptive rendering of the plight of the Byronic hero. It is ironic that Southey should accuse Byron of being of a ‘Satanic school’ when Byron also considered Southey to embody the perverse spirit of Satanic judgement that he first advertised in English Bards. In The Vision of Judgement, Byron’s satirical cannon lands direct hits on Southey’s heaven – a heaven of a distinctly conservative grain. He is notably scathing of Southey’s predicted reconciliation of Milton to the Royalist cause, despite his republican politics on earth. Southey’s intention is to glorify Milton, but at the expense of his political life – one might almost say, with McGann, at the expense of his corporeality. Milton rubs shoulders with the other ‘Elder Worthies’ – poets and religious reformers including Bede, Bacon, Luther, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser. From the list only Milton’s life requires revision: ‘Milton’s severer shade I saw, and in reverence humbled/ Gazed on that soul sublime: of passion now as of blindness/ Heal’d, and no longer here to Kings and to Hierarchs hostile,/ He was assoil’d from taint of the fatal fruit; and in Eden/ Not again to be lost, consorted an equal with Angels’ (IX, 27–31).18 Southey dismisses Milton’s politics for the sake of his own political partiality. 17

   

18

The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, vol. 10, p. 206. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, vol. 10, p. 235.

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Milton’s prominent role in the Commonwealth sits uneasily in a poem extolling the virtues of the monarchy. The need to excuse Milton’s ‘passion’ again emphasises his unique position as poet, spiritual guide and political activist in the Romantic imagination. Milton is the only poet to make it into Southey’s heaven despite his supposed political misdemeanours. Southey associates Milton with his character Eve here, but the tasting of the ‘fatal fruit’ clearly also refers to his dalliance with republicanism. ‘Tasting’ in itself suggests the absence of political consistency upon which we might suppose Byron, bearing in mind Southey’s own apostasy, would have gleefully seized. Milton’s ‘soul sublime’, or verse, recommends him to Southey, despite his politics. Somewhat like his Satan in the hands of Blake, Milton’s various qualities must be separated, his virtues taken from his vices, or more specifically his poetry separated from his public life. It must be pointed out that it is betraying inconsistency that Southey should openly do just this to Milton in his poem, yet in his Preface argues the exact opposite of Byron. Byron was perhaps thinking of Southey’s treatment of Milton more than any other figure, when his own St Peter comments, ‘it seems the custom here to overthrow/ Whatever has been wisely done below’ (xxi, 167–8). Byron undoubtedly admired Milton for his consistency, particularly in his political life. While it is important to remember that he is ridiculing Southey here, it would not be going too far to suggest that Byron’s advocacy of political consistency extended beyond the grave. His own version of heaven and the judgement of George III, as well as Milton, is at times broadly Catholic in its emphasis on works rather than faith alone: ‘his doom/ Depends upon his deeds’ (lxix, 545–6). There is undoubtedly continuity between deeds done on earth and judgement in heaven in Byron’s poem. The thought that Milton would, or indeed could, turn apostate to the cause of Republican freedom as Southey had done was anathema to Byron. But Byron’s ridicule is aimed first and foremost at the ridiculous metaphysics of Southey’s heaven – rife with inconsistent and flawed human judgement, masquerading as the absolute word of God. In the trial of George III, ‘The Accusers’ sent from Hell, including Satan, are struck dumb before the king’s virtue. There is enough Miltonic allusion to suggest that Southey had Milton’s Satan in mind as the model for his own ‘Prince of Darkness’. Southey alludes to ‘a Hell within’ (IV, 48), describes Satan as a ‘fiend’ and recalls the light effects of Paradise Lost, ‘In front was the Presence/ Veil’d with excess of light; and behind was the blackness of darkness’ (V, 2–3). Unlike Paradise Lost, however, Southey removes Satan’s appeal, partly by making him mute, but also by associating him with the character’s traditional hircine iconography (V, 82). Interestingly, this is exactly the fault, which Wordsworth believed Milton was right to rectify, the immediate and facile association of evil with a quickly recognised costume. Southey is also careful to include enough references to the Book of Revelation, particularly to the Whore of Babylon, to present Satan, and his fellow accusers, entirely without sympathy: ‘Many-headed and monstrous the Fiend; with numberless faces,/ Numberless bestial ears erect to all rumours, and restless,/ And with numberless mouths which were fill’d with lies as with arrows’ (V, 13–15). The effect is to

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force the reader, as in Byron’s case, to resist the author’s mock trial or to submit to his politics; in other words the need to read with or against the grain is enforced. The overt political content of A Vision of Judgement promotes division, despite Southey’s protestations that factionalism is a facet of Hell, not heaven: ‘the hubbub of senseless sounds the watchwords of faction,/ Freedom, Invaded Rights, Corruption, and War, and Oppression,/ Loudly enounced were heard’ (V, 18–20). Strangely, Southey’s intent to remove a political factionalism actually reinforces an artistic one, compelling the reader to adopt a contrary position to the grain of his poem. While Byron’s The Vision of Judgement does ridicule specific targets, most prominently the entrance of George III into Southey’s heaven, its more important function is as a critique of judgement itself. In his Preface Byron naturally objects to the term ‘Satanic school’, accusing Southey of paranoia. He also returns to his favourite theme of cant: ‘The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of “Wat Tyler”, are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself – containing the quintessence of his own attributes’.19 What antagonises Byron most, however, as with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, is Southey’s presumption of the role of arbiter: With regard to the supernatural personages treated of, I can only say that I know as much about them, and (as an honest man) have a better right to talk of them than Robert Southey. I have also treated them more tolerantly. The way in which that poor insane creature, the Laureate, deals about his judgements in the next world, is like his own judgement in this. If it was not completely ludicrous, it would be something worse.20

Byron makes two important, and related, points here. The first concerns this world, the political judgement of Southey and his hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. The second is an important artistic point concerning his use, and Byron’s also, of supernatural figures. Byron feels compelled to apologise in advance for his treatment of these personages. The serious point to be made, though, is that Byron rephrases his comments on Milton, isolating the danger inherent in applying labels such as good and evil in this world or the next – thus assuming the role of God. This is not to liken A Vision of Judgement with Paradise Lost. The crucial difference is that Byron rejects the judgement as well as the presumption of the role of judge in Southey’s case. I would argue that Byron never, then, advocates the suspension of ethical decision in poetry. This is too overtly a Wordsworthian position, and, as McGann

19

   

20

BW, vol. 6, p. 309. BW, vol. 6, pp. 310–11.

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informs us, Byron reacted strongly to this brand of Romanticism.21 Southey, for example, can be judged as wrongheaded straightforwardly enough. However, this is political, rather than theological, and I believe that Byron’s comments on Paradise Lost indicate a distinction between the two. More especially, Byron felt quite shocked by Southey’s easy translation of partial, what we could call ‘Satanic’, judgement into absolute authority. This is a distinction that Southey repeatedly fails to make, a failure in his judgement, being happy to connect Satan’s absolute evil with the political radicalism of John Wilkes and Junius – the ‘Accusers’ summoned by Satan. Their evil is, of course, relative to Southey’s conservatism. Byron’s satire on judgement is also a satire on reading against the grain. It is now important to examine in exactly what ways Byron refused to provide an ethical grain for the Byronic hero. II Byron is less interested in the political or moral justifications of Satan, as Southey would have us believe, and more in the continually fascinating questions that surround Milton’s account of the Fall of man. The crux of the matter for Byron is, as Newlyn phrases it in a more political context, ‘if the miscarriage of revolutionary ideals lies in the transition from good to bad motivation, who is finally to be held responsible – the individuals who wield earthly power, the circumstances which act upon their characters, or the divinity which shapes their ends?’22 This is the drama that Byron explores time and again through his heroes, without, I would suggest, offering as clear an answer as Milton, or even Southey, does. The reason that an answer remains undefined is because, arguably until Cain and Don Juan, Byron refuses to subscribe to a particular ethical grain. Byron’s Lara is a case in point. The central character is often overlooked in studies of the Byronic hero but, in some ways, is Byron’s paradigm, and the poem itself seems most obviously to resist a grain in terms of declared ethical position but also narrative form. Of all Byron’s Turkish tales it is probably the most perplexing. ‘Perplexes’ is a word curiously appropriate for a counter-hero such as Lara, who like Milton’s Satan ‘perplexes monarchs’, specifically Otho in the story, but also readers. Or rather Lara, unlike Satan, perplexes because the poem as a verse narrative also does. Part of the reason for this seems to be that Lara is too obviously a hero meant to leave the reader in a state of moral unrest. Lara is 21

  Although Philip Shaw points out that Byron should not be viewed as simply discrediting Wordsworth: ‘whilst it is possible to read Byron as an arch-debunker of Wordsworthian modes of transcendence, sullying the metaphorical sleight of hand that underwrites the relations between mind and nature, self and other, so as to expose an underlying “bad faith”, in doing so we fail to appreciate how urgently Byron resists the mantle of mere sceptic’, ‘Wordsworth or Byron?’, BJ, 31 (2003): 42, 38–50. 22   Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 97.

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dark, brooding – ‘Byronic’ for want of a better expression. In a poem so full of the red imagery of blood, blood let in battle and in a duel, it is entirely consistent with his character that Lara should bleed, physically and metaphysically, black: ‘Kneels Kaled watchful o’er his welling side,/ And with his scarf would staunch the tides that rush,/ With each convulsion, in a blacker gush’ (XVII, 419–21). Lara is not Satanic as such, or of the ‘Satanic school’. There are undoubtedly verbal echoes of Milton’s Satan in Byron’s description of Lara, although for Byron more than the other Romantics perhaps, the devil was equally a biblical figure who exists independently of Milton’s mediation. Lara is similar to Milton’s Satan in being a character already fallen by the time the narrative reaches him: ‘There was in him a vital scorn of all:/ As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,/ He stood a stranger in this breathing world,/ An erring spirit from another hurled’ (XVII, 313–6). Of course, Lara is only figuratively thrown from the face of heaven, but he could well be literally hurled from the text of Paradise Lost. Lara is, though, without the ambition of Milton’s Satan: ‘Ambition, glory, love, the common aim,/ That some can conquer, and that all would claim,/ Within his breast appear’d no more to strive’ (V, 79–81). Like Milton’s Satan, Lara has the vote of the people but depends for his appeal on the intrigue surrounding his aloof reticence, not reason and rhetoric. To all intents and purposes, the reader’s knowledge of Lara’s character progresses no further than the opening stanza of the poem. Byron’s first concern is the ‘Serfs’ who are ‘glad throughout Lara’s wide domain’ (I, 1), and the reader becomes little more enlightened than these Serfs. Yet the moral ambiguity surrounding, or emerging from, Lara is not purely part of an absence of characterisation. There also appears, in contrast to Paradise Lost, to be a lack of moral purpose to the narrative itself. It is difficult to define the genre of the poem; it has a variety of narrative features, but these seem to be continually defeated rather than realised. Byron uses the machinery of story-telling, particularly to create suspense, as when Ezzelin is about to reveal the guilty secrets of Lara’s past: Art thou not he? Whose deeds – Whate’er I be, Words wild as these, accusers like to thee, I list no further. (I, 455–7)

The details are to be delayed, apparently until the next morning, when Ezzelin is formally to accuse Lara of his as-yet-unspecified crimes. The accusations are subsequently forgotten though, through Ezzelin’s no-show and the freshly awakened wrath of Otho. Equally, the proposed duel is denied to the reader by Byron. Just as Shakespeare defeats, in part, the tragic revenge motif by placing Hamlet, a literary figure who questions not only moral but implicitly also narrative codes, within this context, so Byron averts the realisation of the event that his narrative continually anticipates. Lara does not encounter Ezzelin, instead offending Otho who literally throws down his gauntlet for a new duel.

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The relationship that is now thrust to the foreground is that of Lara and Otho. Once again the emphasis is revenge: ‘The moment came, the hour when Otho thought/ Secure at last the vengeance which he sought’ (VII, 212–13). But, neither Otho nor the reader is really ‘secure’ in this pattern of crime and vengeance. True, Lara does die as a result of Otho’s suppression of his uprising, but the death is not at Otho’s hand, which would provide a satisfaction of narrative purpose. Lara dies with an arrow in his side, fired from the bow of an anonymous archer. The situation is entirely unlike that in which Lara wounds Otho – the duel is curiously formal. Lara cries ‘Demand thy life!’ (IV, 71) and only becomes truly dastardly when Otho refuses to follow the code of the duel: ‘And fiercer shook his angry falchion now/ Than when his foe’s was levelled at his brow’ (IV, 75–6). Having made this point, it would not be right to ascribe something like an heroic code to the moral world of Lara. Otho’s refusal to save himself shows a more fundamental disrespect for human life that might equally be supposed to draw Lara’s wrath. At the moment of the duel, the narrative is suspended between endorsing a social moral code and one that much more personally, and ambiguously, derives from Lara himself. Characteristically, Byron maintains this equipoise without unsettling the dramatic balance. The end of the story is equally troubling; presumably Lara had murdered Ezzelin the night before the duel, and this is clearly the implication of the peasant’s tale. But by including the detail out of the narrative sequence, Byron throws further doubt upon the character of Lara and the authority of his narrator. In addition, the peasant’s tale comes immediately after the revelation of Kaled’s secret identity, which is apparently the anticipated climax of the action. This undermines Kaled’s presence and the fact that we could then describe Lara as a celebration of romantic love. The keynote is the final line ‘Her tale untold, her truth too dearly proved’ (XXV, 627). Kaled’s tale is left untold, but equally the narrative is curiously a tale itself untold, although there are moments of action that occur. What is told and what is left untold is, in Lara, repeatedly the cause of dramatic ambiguity, as much, I would argue, as the characterisation of Lara himself. Lara is typical of the Byronic hero in being superficially related to Milton’s Satan but existing without the grain supplied by the narrator of Paradise Lost or even Milton’s God. Admittedly the poem is an extreme example; usually considered to be a case study in Romantic psychology and finding its greatest popularity with French existentialists. Even so, this does not mean that Byron openly advocates the suspension of ethical choice as with Wordsworth, but rather that he presents again and again a dramatic variation on the willed fall of man. Geoffrey Ward accurately states Byron’s relation to the Romantic imagination: images – animate or inanimate, the Gothic ruin or the Satanist – hold the conflicting imperative of a deep- and layered-space view in momentary balance, as images in a dream can resolve for a moment tensions which are irreconcilable by day. But Byron was adept at and fascinated by the use of such images precisely

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because he felt the pressures of the irreconcilability of the old and new worlds more painfully than the other Romantic poets.23

More than being a rephrasing of the Romantic tendency to fudge moral choice, to which Brisman and Newlyn have alerted us, Ward suggests that Byron feels unable to travel very far away from the moral order of a cosmos grounded in Christianity. Nevertheless, an unwillingness to entirely assert the old world persists. Philip Shaw argues that the same is true of Childe Harold: ‘In very crude terms the vision that is put forth in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage owes as much to the stark alternatives of orthodox Christianity as it does to postenlightenment critique.’24 Shaw argues (rightly) that it would be wrong to view Byron purely as a sceptic. But, it remains true that while the reader of Paradise Lost is aware of the wrong choices of Adam and Eve, in the case of Byron’s Lara, Manfred et al., it is unclear exactly what the choice even is. Undoubtedly, transgression of some sort is the repeated locus of dramatic interest, but when the crime is frequently withheld from view, the ability to make clear moral decisions is likewise put in remission; as Marino Faliero comments, ‘the truth is in abeyance’ (V, i, 258). While a reader can be certain that Milton’s Satan fell through his own will, Byron’s allusion to Satan does not always confirm this in his own heroes. One moment in Paradise Lost frequently appears to be invoked by Byron, as it is also by Burke and Shelley – the dawn indicating Satan’s prelapsarian temperament: his form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. (I, 591–9)

In Byron’s case, I think the image of Satan can be compared to the following description of Conrad in The Corsair: when Conrad, disguised as the Dervish, reveals his true identity, it is no coincidence that the action is accompanied by a burst of light: ‘Up rose the Dervise with that burst of light,/ Nor less his change of form appal’d the sight’ (II, iv, 142–3). Light is accompanied by change in outward appearance, recalling the ‘original brightness’ and ‘disastrous twilight’ of Satan’s true Nature. This is followed by overt Satanic allusion, ‘demon death-blow’ (151), 23   Geoffrey Ward, ‘Byron’s Artistry in Deep and Layered Space’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey, Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Liverpool, 1988), p. 198, pp. 191–225. 24   Shaw, ‘Wordsworth or Byron?’, pp. 42–3.

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‘Flung o’er that spot of earth the air of hell!’ (156) As Ward affirms: ‘A set of traits emerge – pallor, damaged glamour, burning eyes, some secret guilt – which were certainly absorbed by Byron as a young man as part of his self-presentation.’25 Both examples here should undoubtedly be read in the context of a sudden outburst of the true Satanic temper. After all, it is earlier in the same poem that Byron, in an anti-Wordsworthian manoeuvre, suggests the possibility that hatred is more primal and instinctive to our origins even than love: ‘Slight are the outward signs of evil thought,/ Within – within – ’twas there the spirit wrought!’ (I, x, 227–8). Love reveals itself while hatred remains hidden. But the narrator concludes that, to those who have felt hatred, ‘with each feature working from the heart’ (239), it can be read in ‘The lip’s least curl’. Byron is consistently fascinated with man’s inability to establish the motivation of his fellow man. There is an apparent simultaneity of darkness and lightness in the heart: Lara has ‘more capacity for love than earth/ Bestows on most of mortal mould’ (I, xviii, 321–2). Yet, in The Corsair, he is a criminal, whose pride recalls Milton’s Satan, ‘the spirit burning but unbent,/ May writhe, rebel – the weak alone repent!’ (II, x, 334–5) Lara/Conrad is a character defined by his capaciousness – able to feel more emotion than ordinary man, but also rendered something of an emotional vacuum by the very vastness of his potential feelings. Lara is made a solid presence by the revelation of Kaled’s romantic love, but also stands as an indefinable vacancy. In Marino Faliero, the same pattern of Satanic allusion to that at work in The Corsair foregrounds the poet’s primary interest in the inexplicable acts of the will. The Doge comments, ‘I am resign’d to the worst; but in me still/ Have something of the blood of brighter days’ (V, i, 272–3), another implicit allusion to the original brightness of Satan perhaps. In Faliero’s case, the allusion works doubly well. Not only does it emphasise Faliero’s Fall, and the attempted radical political change, but the amplification of Milton’s Satan also focuses the reader exactly on the question of personal motivation. From where does evil, if one can label human actions as such, originate in Paradise Lost, but equally in the tragedy of Marino Faliero? Can the reader pass a moral judgement on Faliero in the absence of a moral grain? Taken on one level, Faliero is like Satan, a perplexer of monarchs or, in this case, a perplexer of a similarly implacable social system in Venice. But Faliero is more than this; he is the Doge, the traditional figurehead of Venice and the equivalent of a monarch (whether he has had his powers removed or not). By making him the monarch, Byron also makes him, through allusion, his own perplexer: Byron provides a closure which forces Faliero and the reader to face his private struggle, the transition from motivation to consequence, not the public political one. He becomes the architect of his own destruction as, it could be argued, does Milton’s Satan in a different way; but unlike the external battle of wills between God and Satan in Paradise Lost, Byron’s allusion traps Faliero and the reader into facing the origin of his tragic consequence, whilst refusing to definitively apportion the blame. As with Lara, the invocation of Milton’s Satan 25

  Ward, ‘Byron’s Artistry in Deep and Layered Space’, p. 195.

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is more cosmetic than morally substantial. The Doge is earlier linked to Milton’s Satan when he claims, ‘there is hell within me and around,/ And like a demon who believes and trembles/ Must I abhor and do’ (III, ii, 519–21). But Byron highlights the difference between Faliero and Satan within the very moment of their similarity. Faliero is like Satan, but thrown into introspection in contemplating his own role in tragic consequence. Samuel Chew commented that ‘Byron, more than most poets, works again and again along the same grooves of thought’.26 Each of Byron’s tragic heroes finds fault in his own circumstances but can never wholly believe, or is too proud to relinquish, the fact that he was not the architect of his own downfall. As distinct from Milton’s Satan, the Byronic hero both confirms and denies responsibility for his actions. Sardanapalus argues that ‘I am the very slave of circumstance’ (IV, i, 330), Faliero excuses his part in the plot to bring down Venice – ‘the task/ Is forced upon me, I have sought it not’ (III, i, 9–10) – while Marina in The Two Foscari, repeatedly blames the ‘law’ for sanctioning Loredano’s crime: ‘Thou cowardly murderer by law’ (IV, i, 243). But Sardanapalus and the Doge are forced to confront their own motivation, and Marina mistakes the law for the origin of the tragedy when it only acts as a facilitator. Marina is important because she reads the Foscari’s tragedy as a battle between human nature and implacable law. Of course, this is the traditional origin of neo-classical tragedy. In Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), to make a generic comparison, Don Fernando, in many respects the ideal ruler, effects the reconciliation of the dialectic of nature and law in order to resolve the plot by overturning an anachronistic convention: ‘Cette vieille coutume en ces lieux établie/ Sans couleur de punir un injuste attentat/ Des meilleurs combattants affaiblit un État’ (IV, v, 1416–8).27 Significantly, Marina is out of place in The Two Foscari; her complaints impress but also grate on the reader, and her reading of the tragedy is both mistaken and possibly an ironic comment on critics such as Jeffrey, who saw Byron’s use of the Unities as ostentatiously regressive. The primary point to be made, however, is that the motivation for Loredano’s crime comes from himself, a fact that Francis Foscari realises just before his death when offered a goblet of poison: ‘Then it is false, or you are true./ For my own part, I credit neither’ (V, i, 298–9). In dismissing a Venetian fable (that any crystal containing poison will shatter) as an ‘idle legend’, Foscari also discredits the truth or good of Loredano’s character. He does not say explicitly that Loredano is innately evil, the point is the realisation that he could be, further enforced by Loredano’s final claim that Foscari has paid ‘Nature’s debt and mine’ (V, i, 370) [Byron’s italics], not the debt of the law. This is also the possibility that the reader is forced to face time and again with Byron’s heroes: whether the desire to accept responsibility for one’s own actions is an act motivated by good or the final embrace of Satanic pride. The moral structure of Paradise Lost holds Satan’s decision to   Samuel Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study (New York; repr. 1964), p. 66. 27   Corneille, Le Cid, présentation par Boris Donné (Paris, 2002), p. 163. 26

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disobey God and consequent fall as the origin of evil. This is the moral grain. But Byron’s drama appears to play mischievously with the potential of a joint metaphysical origin of good and evil, the possibility of a Manichean universe. If the Byronic hero recalls Milton’s Satan, then it is not Satan within the narrative context of Paradise Lost, but the Satan who has grown free of his text. As Byron read Paradise Lost as an argument and was aware of Satan’s place within the text, it seems that the relation of Conrad, Lara and Francis Foscari to Milton’s Satan is somewhat decorative rather than of moral essence. A Satanic motif marks the tone of Byron’s verse, but the Byronic hero is an altogether more ambiguous figure lacking the felt directives of Milton’s narrator. In Manfred, there can be no question that Byron’s adaptation of the Faust legend steadfastly fixes the reader’s attentions on the conflicts occurring within his protagonist’s own soul. Byron deliberately removes any question of external temptation as a motivational factor to commit evil by writing the interaction with Mephistopheles out of the drama. In the same way that Byron translates the war of good and evil, exteriorised in Paradise Lost, into the contradictions of the human heart, so he again interiorises the battle by making Manfred, like Marino Faliero, both tempter and tempted. The nearest Byron comes to writing a character equivalent to Mephistopheles is in The Deformed Transformed. Here, the Stranger tempts Arnold by offering him a new body. Yet Byron is quick to point to the innate motivation of man’s actions: once Arnold has his new form, his choice and use are not prescribed as in the case of Marlowe’s Doctor. The Stranger, in the form of Caesar, feels impelled to comment of man that ‘It is a stubborn substance,/ And thinks chaotically, as it acts,/ Ever relapsing into its first elements’ (I, ii, 317–9). Despite the Stranger’s obvious control, he is still confounded by Arnold’s simpleminded insistence on returning to his innate ways. Arnold’s change in shape cannot change his nature, just as Harold’s nature remains consistent throughout his pilgrimage. The variety of countries he visits cannot alter this. Alan Rawes argues that the tragedy of Manfred is the result of ‘a battle between a supernatural machinery which bodies forth a dramatic vision of externalized “Evil”, and Manfred, part tragic hero, and partly offered as a universally representative “Man”’.28 His argument hinges on ‘Zoroastrianisms’ of Act II, scene iv containing the speech of Nemesis to Arimanes and the ‘evil’ spirits: Sovereign of Sovereigns! we are thine, And all that liveth, more or less, is ours, And most things wholly so; still to increase Our power increasing thine, demands our care, And we are vigilant – Thy late commands Have been fulfilled to the utmost. (II, iv, 23–8)

  Alan Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation (Aldershot, 2000), p. 105.

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There can be no doubt that this passage does indeed suggest the presence of the forces of external evil. There can also be no question that the minions of Arimanes are sent to offer Manfred some kind of temptation. The point to be considered is what exactly, both in the context of the text and, typically for Byron, in what has gone before it, does the temptation signify? What is the nature of this temptation? Rawes argues it is the temptation by external evil forces to commit evil. I would suggest that an alternative reading might be the temptation to ‘join’ the legions of evil spirits, rather than to commit an act of evil itself. Rawes suggests that the aid from the Witch of the Alps ‘looks suspiciously like a Faustian self-sacrifice’, while the deal with the seven spirits in Act I, scene I, ‘smacks of a Faustian pact’.29 Both comments hold weight, but what is the pact for? Is it to force Manfred to commit evil, or is it to claim one who is already theirs? I am not arguing, as many have of Milton’s Eve, that Manfred is fallen before acting. Rather, I take it that Manfred has wilfully acted before the opening of the drama. Manfred’s ambiguous crime, possibly incest, has already taken place prior to the opening scene. In fact the reader often gets the sense that it has occurred in his distant past and is undoubtedly concerned with Astarte, not the process of conjuring the spirits within the text. Certainly, it appears that, when Manfred first conjures them, he has met them before, because he already knows (or deludes himself) that he has power over them: ‘I call upon ye by the written charm/ Which gives me power upon you – Rise!’ (I, i, 35–6). If Manfred really is deluded, as Marlowe’s Faustus is, then he is already deluded when the play begins, and any offers of ‘Kingdom, and sway, and strength, and length of days’ (I, i, 168) are merely ornamental. I would argue that Manfred is not deluded or duped but confused. He later comments, ‘I know not what I ask or what I seek’ (II, iv, 132). Of course he does not fully understand Byron’s supernatural hierarchy, but neither does the reader, and this is not as significant as the fact that he eventually does come to realise his own part in his tragedy. Manfred is another poem without a grain; seemingly, as Ward has told us, refuting the old moral world whilst sceptical about embracing the new. Manfred also has a hamartia: ‘Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most/ Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,/ The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life’ (I, i, 10–12). Like Francis Foscari, he has misread his tragedy before this moment of self-knowledge. Unlike Francis Foscari, his revelation occurs at the start of the drama, not the end, although it is rephrased at the conclusion, giving the time between to explore and prolong the agony. Manfred is tragic not despite his high intelligence but because of it. Hence the Abbot, reprising the belated appearance of Marlowe’s Old Man, appeals to Manfred to repent, but his pleadings reach only the mind and not the heart:

29

 

Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation, pp. 110–11.

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let not my humble zeal offend By its abruptness – all it hath of ill Recoils upon me; its good in the effect May light upon your head – could I say heart – Could I touch that, with words or prayers, I should recall a noble spirit which hath wander’d; But is not yet all lost. (III, iv, 47–53)

Manfred’s nature is ‘noble’, but the word is neutral compared to the ‘evil’ of Milton’s Satan. The reader is aware of the possibility that he is not good, despite the ambiguity. The Chamois Hunter, for example, comments, ‘Canst thou be black with evil? – say not so./ Can one of gentle thoughts have wreak’d revenge/ Upon his enemies?’ (II, i, 81–3) Before his demise Manfred finally verbalises what his opening speech attempted to, ‘I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey – / But was my own destroyer’ (III, v, 138–9). Rawes, in discussing Byron’s poetic experimentation, argues that ‘In the unfolding relationship between Byron’s supernatural machinery and Manfred, we witness an imaginative exploration of various ideas about free will, the nature of evil in relation to man, and about man’s relation to the cosmos, but we need not try to grapple with Byron’s metaphysics here, or with what he means by “Evil”’.30 Equally, I have not grappled with the metaphysics, because this is the crux of my argument. Byron expresses a world without a moral grain. The Abbot has a voice but is less of a dramatic presence than the equivalent figure in Dr Faustus, leaving an ambiguity that is absent from the ordered cosmography of Paradise Lost. The consequence is the difficulty to make moral judgements, or read against the grain. Through allusion to Milton’s Satan, the war between good and evil is made a solipsistic agony, which may be sanctioned by circumstances, but never originates there.

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Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation, pp. 105–6.

Chapter 7

Shelley

And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. (Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’) The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. (W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’)

I According to Mark Sandy it is through an ‘exertion of poetic creativity’ that Shelley construes ‘imaginative desperation as innovative opportunit[y] for ingenious poetical triumph’. The culmination of Epipsychidion is probably the best example of poetic failure manifested as victory as the reader witnesses Shelley’s energy fail on the cusp of imaginative consummation. The final exclamation is simultaneously a rendering of poetic vitality and exhaustion of the kind that we saw Blake experience in The Book of Thel: Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of love’s rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. –  I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (587–91)10

Shelley’s words are at once winged and leaden because they have enabled a rendering of Emily, the convent girl who lies behind Epipsychidion but remains unknown literally and metaphorically to the poet, whilst becoming the focus and cause of misunderstanding. Sandy argues that in misunderstanding or disappointed articulation lies an essential Romantic insight into the failure of metaphysical categories of knowing the world – the sort embodied by Milton’s Christianity, Locke’s associationism or the natural philosophy of Rousseau that Shelley tries  10   Mark Sandy, Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Aldershot, 2005), p. 91.  10   SPP, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London, 1977), p. 388. All references to Shelley’s poetry are taken from this edition.

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to overturn in The Triumph of Life. As with his other memorials to visionary splendour – Laon and Cythna, Mont Blanc and Prometheus Unbound – Shelley deflates the fullness of his verbal suggestion at climactic points of imminent revelation. Without resort to such moments of bathos, Shelley would be unable to open the doors of multiple meaning that countersign his most impressive visionary verse and put poetry and reading at the forefront of experience. Like Blake, Shelley often conflates failure and success by blending the act of reading with Derrida’s later emphasis on writing manifested in the person of the poet intruding on his own work. Shelley refashions Milton, and consequently Paradise Lost, in a similar manner by rewriting the relation of the poet with his most famous poem no less spectacularly than Burke and Blake did. In the manner of his rewriting, Shelley further advances the process of the formal disfigurement of Milton’s epic that Coleridge and Wordsworth began, going beyond merely emptying authorial intention from poetry. Indeed I would go so far as to argue that, when it comes to Mont Blanc and Prometheus Unbound, the role Shelley plays in the Romantic legacy of Paradise Lost is one that undermines any remaining notions of intentionality. It would be entirely erroneous to believe that Shelley for example ‘turned Paradise Lost upside down’ and challenged Milton’s argument (and his God) through advocating Satan as a model of ethical behaviour. In On the Devil and Devils, which Wittreich and Curran argue was written the year before Prometheus Unbound in 1819, Shelley composed a dissertation on the popular personification of Lucifer and the attendant mythology. He draws a clear distinction between the Devil of Christian theology and Milton’s Satan, arguing that the paradox of the presence of evil in a universe authored by a compassionate deity motivated theologians to invent a cause. The result was the fiction of a ‘Devil’ whereby Christians could reconcile omnipotence, and benevolence, and equity, in the Author of an Universe where evil and good are inextricably intangled and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are for ever baffled by  misery and decay.10

Shelley characterizes Christianity as a rational impossibility that undermines its own metaphysics, because it claims to hold a definitive answer to an essentially unanswerable question. . It is noticeable that Shelley often posits his rhetorical questions or poetic unanswerables as satiric varieties of religious speculative probing. For example in The Triumph of Life, both Shelley the poet and Rousseau the guide push the poem forward by exploratory emphasis: ‘“And what is this?/ Whose shape is that within the car? And why” –/ I would have added “is all here amiss?”’ (177–9).  10   Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ‘The Dating of Shelley’s “On the Devil, and Devils”’, K-SJ, 21–2 (1972–1973): 83–94.  10   ROM, p. 533.

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The answers that Rousseau offers to the poet-narrator only ever bear an approximate relation to the questions asked however leaving the poet, as in this case, with halfformed utterances in his mouth. Otherwise the poem is built upon sequences of non-sequiturs as in the open ending where the unwritten answer to the poet’s final question suggests only tangential relations with the rest of the poem or the pageant of Life which is already departing the scene: “Then what is Life?” I said … the cripple cast His eye upon the car which now had rolled Onward, as if that look must be the last, And answered…. “Happy those for whom the fold Of.” (544–8)

While satiric attacks upon absolutism lie behind the Socratic question-and-answer model of understanding, we should not allow Shelley to always claim that register as the end of Epipsychidion quoted above suggests genuine despair, not irony, at the failure of vision and language to come to terms with it. Perhaps indicatively, Shelley ends The Triumph of Life in the midst of a sentence that resembles most closely a Horatian aphorism – ‘Happy the man’ – rather than a new expression of imaginative emancipation. Even in his most progressive work, Shelley invokes classical models of thought as he stands upon the brink of transcendence. Nevertheless, the desire to empty metaphysical speculation from works of poetic vision prompts Shelley to reject the orthodox moral notions of the Devil and find something allegedly more profound in Milton’s conception of Satan. In A Defence of Poetry (1821) he writes, ‘Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the character of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost’ where our stress should fall on Burkean understandings of grandeur and energy and Coleridgean conceptions of the poet as hero. Unlike Byron, Shelley considered Milton’s Satan not in relation to the argument of Paradise Lost but as an expression of pure aesthetic or mental elevation, emphasised in near identical comments made in ‘On the Devil and Devils’: ‘Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil’. Again ‘energy’ and ‘magnificence’ are redolent of a Burkean sublime, and the argument of Paradise Lost becomes gradually obscured behind the organising principle of aesthetic merit. It should be asserted, however, that at some point in Shelley’s train of thought the very replacement of Christian ethics with Romantic transcendence begins to mean, à la Gordon Teskey, that literary merit is hostile to Milton’s argument: ‘Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture,  10   SPP, p. 470.  10   SPP, p. 498.  10   ROM, p. 534.

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is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy’. Elsewhere he writes, ‘Milton so far violated all that part of the popular creed which is susceptible of being preached and defended in argument, as to allege no superiority in moral virtue to his God over his Devil’. Noticeably, Shelley exerts his moral commentary on the issue of revenge. God exacts revenge on Satan because he attempted to usurp the Son in Heaven; Satan goes through the motions of revenge but can only execute a botched job or fall back on compromise. But Shelley has a particular understanding of revenge, one manifested in Prometheus Unbound, but also in The Cenci that provides a gloss on both his moral and formal understanding of Paradise Lost. In the Preface to The Cenci Shelley writes that ‘There must … be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose’.10 Shelley objects to the kind of hypocritical ‘cant’ that Byron attacked so fiercely and continuously, but in the process he goes about disabling his reader’s ability to judge the actions of Beatrice as a tragic heroine. It is in the restless and anatomising casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered consists.11

Shelley opposes the kind of ‘wrongs’ and ‘revenge’ here that we find in his reading of Milton’s Satan. To unpick the fine balance that Shelley dramatically contrives between the wronged Beatrice and the role she plays in the patricide of Count Cenci would be to sacrifice drama for dogma. In essence, no completely satisfactory moral understanding of the plot can be reached because tragedy as a genre requires us to weigh irreconcilables beyond the ordinary thresholds of good judgement. Shelley delights in the intensity of a response described as ‘superstitious horror’, foregrounding the traditional markers of those who witness the sublime. One of the peculiarities of The Cenci is that a murder is made to seem morally right or excusable, which unsettles normative claims to ethics in the manner of the great tragedians Racine and Shakespeare. Behind ‘superstitious horror’ lies the sublime category of aesthetic and psychological pleasure drawn from moments of terror, a feature that A.D. Nuttall labels ‘The theory that tragic pleasure consists not in some conscious re-construing of apparently desolating actions but in a psychic discharge, the process of which is not noticed though its consequence is felt’.12 In one sense then the truth of The Cenci is that claims to definitive rights or wrongs must be suspended or left unresolved in the mind of the reader.  10    10   10   11   12  

ROM, pp. 534–5. ROM, p. 535. SPP, p. 240. SPP, p. 240. A.D. Nuttall, Why does tragedy give pleasure? (Oxford, 1996; repr. 2001), p. 39.

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By encasing moral wrong (murder) inside an action of dramatic right (revenge), Shelley plays for a subtler moral truth than that of cant through the implementation of casuistry. As he rightly asserts, the overt intrusion of cold moral judgment is alien to the rarefied themes of tragedy, ‘Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner, she would have been wiser and better, but she would never have been a tragic character’.13 The reader’s act of balancing achieves a ‘higher’ aesthetic understanding of our inability to condemn Beatrice whilst being unable to fully endorse her behaviour. The very procedure of definitively defending Beatrice in tyrannicide is an active moral decision that breaks upon the wheel of drama. Noticeably when Beatrice is ritualised at the culmination of Act five, as with the pyre of Byron’s Sardanapalus, drama, or the sense of ‘becoming’ a murderess, is sacrificed in Kierkegaard’s terms, to a dramatic state of ‘being’: Here, Mother, tie My girdle for me, and bind up this hair In any simple knot; aye, that does well. And yours I see is coming down. How often Have we done this for one another; now We shall not do it any more. (5, 4, 159–64)14

Shelley presents Beatrice isolated on the stage and statuesque, divorced from her significance in the rest of the play and, like Keats’ urn, refusing to be remoulded by fresh interpretation. Having come through the process of catharsis, the reader finds that by the end of the play Beatrice simply ‘is’. Despite reversing the earlier symbol of rape – ‘How comes this hair undone?’ (3,1,6) – the primary function of the tableau is to blur what Beatrice has become by conveying the final ‘superstitious horror’ of a woman awaiting execution. The type of casuistry that forms the essence of The Cenci in terms of both story and genre is also however what draws Shelley’s fire in reading Paradise Lost. It is famously in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound that Shelley purposefully excludes the character as a fit subject for his drama and chooses instead the more malleable figure from Aeschylus. Yet the moral concerns which emerge from Shelley’s rejection of Satan follow a similar course to those which prompted his love of the figure of Beatrice: The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse.15 13

    15   14

SPP, p. 240. SPP, p. 301. SPP, p. 133.

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This time casuistry is pernicious because it draws on religious preconceptions – previous modes of thought – that cloud our aesthetic appreciation of Paradise Lost. To bait the Christian reader, Shelley describes evil as ‘faults’ as though the war in heaven were an aberration in Satan’s otherwise steadfast character. What was prime material for the dramatist is not, however, suitable territory for the epic poet, as Shelley understands that the formal demands and locus of our interest must be different in each case. It should also be noted that the process of casuistry is pernicious in this instance because the scales weigh too heavily on one side compromising the irresolution for which Shelley strives in The Cenci. What Shelley in fact tells us here is that a Romantic version of Satan should not be seen too clearly or, to all intents and purposes, within the full narrative of Paradise Lost. Throughout Imageless Truths, Karen A. Weisman stresses the creativity that arises out of Shelley’s uncertainty, something that naturally draws him away from the ‘fixed’ or intended Satan of Paradise Lost as a choice subject for poetry about freedom. Or to be more accurate, it draws him away from the demands of Milton’s narrative which entails a process of fixing Satan to a particular moral position. Like Blake, Shelley’s revolution can only be realised through aesthetic means because the political alternative to a Satanic revolution remains unspoken. The primary way of claiming such liberation from prior models seems, for Shelley, to have been to experiment with poetic form and create irresolution through similar tactics to Levinson’s theory of the Romantic Fragment Poem. In A Defence of Poetry the form that comes off worst is significantly narrative: A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.16

Through a logic similar to that of Wordsworth, Shelley thrusts the process of creation to the fore at the expense of objectively rendered stories pointing towards a new kind of textual coherence, the sort that Jonathan Bate finds first in Schlegel whereby ‘the aesthetic unity comes from within, it is not imposed from without in the form of “rules”’.17 Karl Kroeber supports this when he argues that by the end of the eighteenth century ‘Genre … becomes an intriguing subject for experimentation rather than merely an accepted mode of procedure’.18 It is appropriate therefore that it is almost impossible to assign Prometheus Unbound to a pre-existing genre. In the Preface, Shelley labels his work a ‘Poem’ but also ‘drama’, ‘imagery’ and   SPP, p. 485.   The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 5. 18   Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Madison, 1975), p. 9. 16 17

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finally, vaguest of all, ‘this power’. I will later discuss how the word ‘Power’ might relate to Milton in ‘Mont Blanc’, but for the moment it is enough to state that what is undoubtedly felt in Prometheus Unbound, appropriately through its absence, is the lack of a narrative per se. Instead Shelley portrays his own mind – ‘the mind of the creator’ – just as Wordsworth does in The Prelude. Jeffrey Scwharz maintains that ‘The locus of the poetic drama occurs when Prometheus recants his curse on Jupiter, for at this focal point, time changes from a linear, causal progression to an open-ended plurality’.19 We should here recall Newlyn’s foregrounding of epiphany and Brisman’s moments of suspended choice. We have seen that the one action of Blake’s Milton is the possession of the poet by his precursor; the one verifiable action of Prometheus Unbound is the retraction of the curse. Everything else takes its meaning from this profound moment, and all characters try to interpret or render their version of events. Plurality, if it is to be achieved, functions through instances of conflicting readings of this moment and defying strategies of closure. As with Blake’s Milton, it follows that throughout Prometheus Unbound any sense of the linear temporality that characterises Milton’s epic, through which moral decisions are presented, is suppressed by the self-justification of the act of rejecting the curse. Equally there is no drama in Prometheus Unbound, unlike The Cenci, where the suspension of moral judgement constitutes an enlightened ethical response. Shelley instead reconstitutes the motif of Satanic revenge taken from Paradise Lost as a single moment in which that motif is rejected. As we will see, the recantation of the curse may be held open to multiple readings or interpretations through characters such as Panthea and Ione, but it is not the nature of these interpretations so much as the fact that they are made at all which validates Prometheus’ decision. Thereby what is sacrificed in the many allusions to Paradise Lost is temporality and eschatology. Prometheus’ quest for liberation is quite different from that of Milton’s Satan in being an ongoing textual one, exclusively phenomelogical, and much closer to that of Blake’s Milton. Weisman notes that Shelley’s stress on plural interpretation is necessitated due to the faltering memory of Prometheus: ‘When he finally repents for having cursed Jupiter, he finds that he cannot remember the words of the curse’.20 Being unable to recall his version of events other than through vision, Prometheus is forced to rely on the disembodied elemental voices from the mountains, springs, air and whirlwinds. It is important to note that by summoning other voices to speak his own part Prometheus characteristically surrenders his power. In this case he gives up his power as an interpreter and effectively silences his chance to render events. He appeals instead to what should be a more objective reading:

19

  Jeffrey A. Schwarz, ‘Shelley’s Eternal Time: Harmonizing Form and Content in Prometheus Unbound’, K-SR, 13 (1999): 76, 76–87. 20   Weisman, Imageless Truths, p. 86.

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If then my words had power – Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within, although no memory be Of what is hate – let me not lose it now! What was that curse? For ye all heard me speak. (I, 69–73)21

The voices prove to be unreliable narrators. Prometheus stands back to listen or read the testimony of other authorities on his own actions, but the other ‘readers’ of the curse, are interrupted by Prometheus’ sisters who disturb the chance to gain a dominant perspective. The prevailing theme is observation or more accurately the inability to view action clearly, at first through apparent fearfulness: My wings are folded o’er mine ears, My wings are crossed over mine eyes, Yet through their silver shade appears And through their lulling plumes arise A Shape, a throng of sounds: May it be, no ill to thee O thou of many wounds! Near to whom for our sweet sister’s sake Ever thus we watch and wake. (I, 222–30)

Significantly, Ione’s words recall the angels’ inability to clearly view Milton’s God in Paradise Lost: ‘brightest seraphim/ Approach not but with both wings veil their eyes’ (PL, III, 381–2). The apparition or ‘Shape’ recalls the ‘Shape arrayed in mail’ of The Mask of Anarchy or the ‘execrable shape’ (PL, II, 681) of Milton’s Death. But the ambiguous ‘Shape’ taking form in Prometheus Unbound lacks a metaphysical status. Instead it is defined as a ‘throng of sounds’, an aspect suggestive of the oral quality of language. Equally the Shape is not a single sound but a ‘throng’, the union of many conflicting sounds. Shelley stresses the polyphonic nature of the music, like the voices of the elements, but rather than provide harmony it instead undermines the attribution of positive univocal authority to the origin of the voice. Shelley is interested, it seems, in portraying not the moral absolutes of Milton’s God or Satan but, rather, the feeling of intensely experienced vision, ‘Obscurely through my brain like shadows dim/ Sweep awful thoughts rapid and thick – I feel/ Faint, like one mingled in entwining love’. Here Prometheus buckles under the concentration of physical and mental suffering, but the nature of these ‘awful’ thoughts cannot be verified. Instead Prometheus reaches for a metaphor, ‘like one mingled in eternal love’. The nature of Prometheus’ thoughts, like that of the curse, is obscured by the train of associated images that it will inevitably suggest.

21

 

SPP, p. 138.

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Neither sight nor sound can determine then the nature of Prometheus’ message without becoming figurative. It is therefore unsurprising to discover that the voice of the Phantasm takes on a form likened to that of the written word: I see the curse on gestures proud and cold, And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate, And such despair as mocks itself with smiles, Written as on a scroll. (I, 258–61)

Once more Prometheus is required to become a reader of his own indeterminate nature, vertiginously hovering above his past and cast in the role of a seeker of meaning. The first act of interpretation is significantly to suggest that these original actions or ‘gestures’ indicate a satanic lexis: ‘proud’, ‘cold’, ‘defiance’ and ‘hate’. They recall any number of similar descriptions of Satan in Pandemonium: ‘All is not lost – the unconquerable will,/ And study of revenge, immortal hate,/ And courage never to submit or yield’ (PL, I, 106–8). The Phantasm of Jupiter can therefore from this point onwards be considered to be a written word ‘as on a scroll’; in other words a dead metaphor or an utterance that constitutes a fixed and unalterable sign in the sense that it resides in the past. It is actually then the process of the rejection of the words of the curse – their fixed and verifiable meaning – that signifies liberation for Prometheus. The rejection of verifiable meaning in the present moment and its continued rejection in the future will be a victory for interpretation over the metaphysics of the scroll. The Satanic rhetoric in the voice of the Phantasm is empty of the kind of significance Milton’s Satan takes from God because it has been abstracted from the past into the present, from metaphysics to metaphor. Prometheus’ moment of awakening comes when he senses the power of his own discourse and so ultimately of his perception: ‘Evil minds change good to their own nature’. The progression from Milton’s Satan, ‘fixed’ both to Milton’s God and to the narrative of Paradise Lost, is verbalised and so, on Shelley’s terms, overcome. Importantly, the Phantasm’s curse as viewed in the ‘scroll’ binds Prometheus to Jupiter through a ‘fixed mind’, the mind of Milton’s Satan selected in this case by Shelley for its inflexibility. ‘Fiend, I defy thee! With a clam and fixed mind’ (I, 26) recalls Milton’s fallen angels, ‘Breathing united force with fixed thought (PL, I, 560). The presence of Ione and Panthea as viewers of the Promethean opera complicates, as I have noted, my emphasis on visionary perception, but they must ultimately take their meaning from Prometheus’ renunciation as well. To an extent they witness the liberation of the Titan, albeit unsuccessfully at first through Panthea’s ambiguous dream, but do not have significance outside that moment of enlightenment. The rejuvenation of Prometheus and Asia is signified by a new form of illumination, separate from that of Prometheus and Jupiter, in the likeness of Shelley’s flame of intellectual beauty. Panthea questions the Spirit of the Hour, ‘O Spirit! Pause and tell whence is the light/ Which fills the cloud? The sun is yet unrisen’ (II, v, 8–9). The answer she receives confirms that Asia embodies a

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new revolutionary aesthetic whose luminosity emanates from a source other than heavenly light, ‘the light/ Which fills this vapour, as the aerial hue/ Of fountaingazing roses fills the water,/ Flows from thy mighty sister’ (II, v, 11–14). Perhaps strangely, Shelley again recalls the brightness of Milton’s God, ‘I dare not look on thee;/ I feel, but see thee not’ (II, v, 16–17). However, this is only temporary and is followed by the voice of the spirits, which reassert the association with the inextinguishable fire of Satanic energy: Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest. (II, v, 54–9)

The light of Asia’s new morning is viewed through the ‘atmosphere divinest’. The atmosphere seems to have the same origin, and to be coextensive with, her newly discovered illumination. There is no sense here that her revolutionary identity takes its nature from opposition to a heavenly or any other light, as Satan takes his nature from Milton’s God. Shelley takes the vehicle of Milton’s image and creates from it the tenor to carry his own poetic philosophy. I agree in part with Abrams that ‘Asia’s movement toward reunion is a spiritual journey which, in consonance with the great Romantic trope, is specifically a Bildungsreise, in the course of which she acquires essential knowledge that leaves her radically altered’.22 But, allusion to Paradise Lost indicates that a more accurate description is to see Asia not ‘radically altered’ but radically restored – restored, as Milton’s Satan, to former glory undimmed by his place in Milton’s narrative, through the pattern of allusion to the light effects of Paradise Lost. In the process we can note that Shelley leaves behind Milton’s Satan and the discussion of moral casuistry that dominates the Preface. For Prometheus the opportunity for liberation is defined by the fact that ‘like Blake, he concludes that evolution to perfection can occur only in the human consciousness’.23 The movement from ‘fixed’ Satan to unchained Prometheus in Shelley’s mythology comes with the knowledge that ‘the prophecy would be fulfilled and evil overthrown only when Prometheus had vanquished the evil within himself’.24 Mercury’s arrival following the vision also suggests allusion to Paradise Lost, ‘from thy sight/ Returning for a season, Heaven seems Hell,/ So thy worn form pursues me night and day,/ Smiling reproach’ (I, 357–60). The reader cannot fail 22   M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London, 1971), p. 304. 23   Linda Lewis, The Promethean Politics of Milton, Blake, and Shelley (Columbia, 1992), p. 157. 24   E.B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York, 1941), p. 166.

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to make the link with Satan’s assertion that ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself,/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’ (PL, I, 254–5). Significantly the emphasis is altered in Shelley’s allusion. Milton’s stress falls equally on the singularity of the creative or ‘making’ consciousness, in this case Satan’s, and on the dangerous delusions of a mind immersed only ‘in itself’. Shelley as a Romantic writer instead takes the vehicle of making (that is poiesis), subtracts the genuine metaphysical exchange of Hell for Heaven that Milton’s Satan craves, and allows Heaven to seem Hell. The allusion suggests an awareness of similarity but primarily figurative discontinuity with the narrative of Paradise Lost – a reading made against the grain of Milton’s authorial intent through the emphasis on poetic creativity over moral responsibility, metaphor over metaphysics. The recantation of the curse marks a transition from viewing Satan in the terms of Milton’s narrative teleology, albeit recomposed in Prometheus’ vision, to seeing what the character can signify when removed from the incumbents of Milton’s plot. When Mercury arrives, decisive action is predicted but the poem does not advance structurally or temporally other than in that the governing moment of perception, or reading paradigm, has altered and the chains of past thought are sacrificed for those of future readings. Like the pine trees that surround Mont Blanc, Shelley’s Titans and Milton’s Satan are ‘Children of elder time, in whose devotion/ The chainless winds still come and ever came/ To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging/ To hear – an old and solemn harmony’ (21–4). The solemnity is heard when the winds listen attentively. Yet they must not only listen. They must also create afresh – make new figurative associations – to prevent being consigned to the irretrievable past. When Prometheus recants his quest, Shelley makes a pun on the word ‘recall’, ‘The Curse/ Once breathed on thee I would recall’ (I, 58–9). ‘Recall’ suggests retrieval through memory but also withdrawal from a previous commitment. The imaginative alteration within Prometheus has allowed him to escape the contract of hate with Jupiter by sacrificing the rational grounds on which all such contracts are written. Even so the importance of interpretative variety is stressed again through the closed and personal nature of Prometheus’ visionary achievement: There is a secret known To thee and to none else of living things Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven, The fear of which perplexes the Supreme. (I, 371–4)

The verb ‘perplexes’ seems to be intentionally chosen in order to recall the prelapsarian state of Milton’s Satan that Burke makes central to his theory of the sublime. The passage hints at Satan’s magnificence which ‘perplexes monarchs’ before perfection was sacrificed for the intestine strife of Pandemonium, whereby the threat of revolution is likened to superstitious belief in the portent of sunrise or solar eclipse. But when Shelley uses the word ‘perplexes’, he specifically intends it to be focused on a continuing threat to tyranny manifested in the Jupiter/

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Prometheus power contract. Milton’s simile enhances his purpose in emphasising Satan’s fall from grace. Shelley’s metaphor is his purpose; new significance for the image guarantees the transfer of Heaven’s sceptre. II If for Shelley it is true that thought, or the realisation of thought in language and metaphor, is the only reality available, isolated from what Kant called the ‘thing-initself’, then it quickly becomes apparent that it is through textually overthrowing fixed and determinate meaning that Shelley’s Titan will find liberation. As Weisman argues, ‘Shelley refines and qualifies, again and again, the view that we create from our impoverishment’.25 Physically and mentally impoverished as Prometheus is by the contract of power that binds him to Jupiter, the curse allows him to recreate the past and renounce its future significance. Language, or the suggestion of a stable referent for language, is malleable in Shelley’s verse in a way that counters the overriding principles of Paradise Lost. In one sense we could even argue that the rejection of the Phantasm’s curse by Prometheus is actually the rejection of Paradise Lost – not of Milton as poet, but of Paradise Lost. Stuart Curran argues that despite obvious references to Aeschylus and Hesiod, ‘[Shelley’s] intention to rewrite Milton’s epic theodicy is everywhere manifest’.26 He also asserts that ‘Unconcerned with accruing intellectual debts, he is determined to maintain a narrative independence. Echoes and influences in his epic may manifest, but in plot Shelley is staunchly his own’.27 In rejecting the metaphysics of Milton’s Christian epic, in which qualities such as pride and hate are fixed signifiers, Shelley finds he needs to define a new quest. As with the other Romantics, the quest is one in which language or communication becomes its own subject. Weisman argues that ‘the host problem now is not so much how to make language work for him, but how to reconcile himself to living with the given limitations of language’.28 When Shelley writes Mont Blanc, for example, he again relies linguistically on the kind of bathos that we find at the defeated climax of Epipsychidion and manifested in the inability of characters such as Ione and Panthea to interpret the significance of Prometheus and Asia definitively. In a seminal essay on Mont Blanc, Charles H. Vivian described Shelley’s verse as though it were in thrall as much to its own processes as to the transcendent power that the mountain signifies. He suggests that the poem marks and enacts an alteration in Shelley’s thought from belief in empiricism to faith in idealism and pauses over Shelley’s emphasis on the mind’s role in producing   Weisman, Imageless Truths, p. 93.   Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, 1975), p. 40. 27   Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, p. 36. 28   Weisman, Imageless Truths, p. 82. 25 26

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meaning or interpreting the ‘Power’ that constitutes its origins or else appears embedded in the landscape ‘with a sound but half its own’. Vivian rehearses what would become a common theme in Shelley criticism when he comments, ‘The mind neither gives nor takes exclusively; it does both in equal degree – and the product of these operations, consciousness, is quite literally “half its own”. Whatever the validity of this position, it is the one which Shelley not only takes at the beginning but maintains throughout the poem’.29 In more recent years Fazel Abroon has moved the territory from a symbiotic relationship between poet and natural world, both giving and receiving in a type of harmony, to the role of the poet as writer and the conjuror of language. She stresses the metaphoricity that the poet continually relies on when he searches through language for appropriate imagery to describe an ineffable experience. Focusing on the fact that ‘the Power’ is first described ‘in likeness to the Arve’ [italics added] she writes, ‘Mont Blanc is a symbol of thingness, thing without referentiality; a sign, though it cannot be properly called so, with no signified. It exists where there is no linguistic or sign system, and therefore, it is beyond understanding. It is simply out there, a pure presence and no more’.30 In Abroon’s version of the poem Mont Blanc is an endlessly provisional presence (or perhaps absence would be a better word) retreating behind the poet’s attempts to describe it. There are good reasons to pursue the linguistic reading of Abroon, because it inhabits the relativistic world of polysemy and proliferating meaning that we have seen the Romantics and modern critics apply to Paradise Lost. But this does not mean that we should necessarily dismiss the reading of interplay between mind and nature of the kind Vivian advanced. The opening of the poem first spells out the changeability in the ‘everlasting universe of things’ that recalls the type of perspective Wordsworth tries to stabilise in his pedestrian poems: Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom – Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters, – with a sound but half its own. (I, 3–6)

The opening of the poem occupies a ceaseless present moment through the insistent repetition of ‘Now’. As usual, the Romantic poet is discovered in the midst of life, aware of thought but with a sense only that the origin and purpose of poetic inspiration is perplexing. As with Milton’s invocation to ‘holy light’ – the origin of both his creative and spiritual faculties – Shelley finds that his ability to understand the ‘source’ of thought is compromised by the ongoing presence of thought at the point of poetic composition. The paradox is one that Robert Young puts well, whereby language ‘has no ground from which to view its object,   Charles H. Vivian, ‘The One “Mont Blanc”’, in SPP, p. 571.   Fazel Abroon, ‘“Mont Blanc”: Transcendence in Shelley’s Relational System’, Literature & Theology, 15/2 (June 2001): 159, 159–73. 29 30

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language, objectively’.31 By writing poetry, Shelley participates in the outpouring of creativity which ‘flows through the mind’ and consequently cannot know or render its source. So rather than stay on topic, Shelley immediately becomes associative as the nature of everlasting ‘things’, which can only be described in terms of a Miltonic or Coleridgean fountain of inspiration anyway, finds an appropriate metaphor in the image of a quiet stream among the mountains: Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (7–11)

The image of the mind and what it owes to its point of creation is figured as though it were a whisper underneath a vast cacophony of other noise. The image is one of emptiness, but it is also a triumph as the mind itself asserts its power by achieving the association of thought and stream. As the poet claims that the tribute he can bring to the mind is only the ‘waters’ or ‘feeble brook’, the act of writing asserts otherwise that the continued presence of that great power which lies in the synthesising command of the Romantic imagination is rigorously present. Sandy endorses the notion when he rightly comments, ‘In fact, these tumultuous waters of the ravine are just another figment of Shelley’s “human mind’s imaginings”’.32 The effect of reading the opening of ‘Mont Blanc’ is not unlike Bloom’s revisionary ratio of daemonisation which he describes as ‘a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime … the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor’.33 Bloom’s vocabulary here would appear to be well-suited to attempting to decode ‘Mont Blanc’. Because Shelley’s ‘feeble brook’ is compared to the ‘waterfalls’ and ‘vast river’, it is suggestive not of ‘beauty’ exactly but of a counter to the sublime. If Milton and Paradise Lost stand behind these lines as I believe, then Shelley could well be described as alluding to Paradise Lost in such a way that he clears a space for his own poetic voice to rewrite its relationship with a source of immense ‘Power’. Abroon writes that ‘In “Mont Blanc” there are two conceptions of Power: an ontological and inaccessible transcendent Power conveyed by the image of Mont Blanc and a Power immanent in Nature with no single definite image but captured in a series of images which are related to each

31   Robert Young, Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston, London and Henley, 1981), p. 7. 32   Sandy, Poetics of Self and Form, p. 74. 33   Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford, 1973; repr. 1997), p. 15.

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other: “Power in likeness of the Arve”’.34 She essentially indicates the accretive nature of Romantic language that I have described in the figurative operations of Blake and Wordsworth, and there is no doubt that elsewhere in Shelley’s verse the use of ‘image’ as ‘series’ is an important trope. In Epipsychidion, for instance, Shelley opens the poem with a succinct figure recalling Paradise Lost, but the suggestiveness of Milton necessitates the use of additional images that becomes almost a parody of the Romantic poet reaching for the perfect description: Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman All that is insupportable in thee Of light, and love, and immortality! Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse! Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe! Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm! Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and Thus Terror! Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on! Aye even the dim words which obscure thee now Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow. (21–34)

As Donald Reiman notes, the singular form of ‘Seraph’ was first used in English by Milton (PL, III, 667), and Shelley invokes a Miltonic register to capture the significance of Emily.35 The register is however hopelessly out of proportion with the quotidian subject of the verse, as though Shelley had the desire to take on an ineffable subject but did not find one to hand. It is the power of suggestiveness that enthrals both poet and reader, an insight into the power of figuration rather than into the ‘everlasting universe of things’ as it could be conceived in an immanent or transcendent, as opposed to phenomenal, sense. The apostrophe is typically maintained only for as long as the poet’s strength or enthusiasm gives sustenance and bathos is the ultimate destination of the visionary splendour. The ‘dim’ words not only fail to register the significance of the ‘real’ Emily but actually occlude her through the polysemous aesthetic. Ann Wordsworth’s reading of Bloom provides the most sensible interpretation of Shelley’s method in Epipsychidion, ‘Mont Blanc’ and elsewhere when she writes, ‘the demands of the poetic condition are such that the cognitive workings of the poem are patterned as defensive moves of rhetoricity and image, a word-consciousness so intense that the semantic content is 34

  Abroon, “Mont Blanc”, p. 160.   SPP, p. 374.

35

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less important than the meaning generated by the tropic patterns in themselves’.36 The fact that one trope prompts another thereby becomes more important in a reading of Epipsychidion than the choice of words and the referents that they suggest. Shelley is word-conscious to a degree that means he can only elaborate metaphorically on Milton’s notion of a ‘Seraph’ without probing its meaning in terms of Christianity or the heterodox Miltonic version of it offered as a creed in Paradise Lost. In the case of ‘Mont Blanc’, however, this does not do away, as I have argued, with the suggestion that there really is a tangible transcendent presence beyond the limits of the poet’s own self-reference. Abroon rightly argues that the mountain is ‘an immutable essence that exists but is imperceptible’.37 Shelley believed in an ontological transcendence (‘idealism’ for Vivian) that was extra-linguistic, but he felt it could only be manifested through language, ‘the mountain should be taken out of its unrelational presence, and placed in the relational context of a sign system’.38 In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ a similar belief is expressed in the weak but not extinguished power exterior to the phenomenal mind ‘That thou – O awful LOVELINESS,/ Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express’ (71–2). Sandy reads these lines, like the end of ‘Mont Blanc’, as another form of triumph because the poet is forced to create from lack of faith, ‘In absence of a revelation from the ‘awful LOVELINESS’ about the meaningful nature of things, Shelley seizes upon this vacancy as an opportunity to exercise his imagination to produce a consoling and supplementary fiction’.39 Throughout ‘Mont Blanc’ the description of the Power does read at times as though it is a supplement to the natural world only existing in the poet’s mind. The Power ‘dwells apart’ like Milton’s ‘holy light’, ‘in its tranquillity/ Remote, serene, and inaccessible’ (96–7), so Shelley turns his attention instead to the multiplicity of the life that circles around the mountain and then speculates on man’s littleness in comparison with Nature’s enduring strength: The race Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, And their place not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever 36   Ann Wordsworth, ‘An Art that will not Abandon the Self to Language: Bloom, Tennyson, and the Blind World of the Wish’, in Untying the Text: a Post–Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston, London and Henley, 1981), p. 213. 37   Abroon, “Mont Blanc”, p. 160. 38   Abroon, “Mont Blanc”, p. 160. 39   Sandy, Poetics of Self and Form, p. 73.

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Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air. Mont Blanc yet gleams on high. (117–27)

The sudden intrusion of the mountain upon the poet’s lyrical meditations on time and human nature comes with a start as Shelley describes the abrupt termination of his thoughts in line 127. The power of the mountain has exerted itself dramatically in this moment in an exact endorsement of the conclusions that Shelley was already drawing – man is forced out of rational speculation by the natural world. It is entirely appropriate then that the poet’s thoughts break off in mid-flow in the sudden realisation that the mountain still stands immutable and present to his view. The exclamatory ‘Mont Blanc yet gleams on high’ reads as though sunlight has suddenly picked out the summit and impressed presence back on the lyricist’s thoughts. As Sally West remarks, ‘Through language, Shelley creates not a description of either the mind or the mountain, but a replication of the experience of the one comprehending the other’.40 Shelley goes on to comment affirmatively that ‘the power is there’, and if the focus here is on enormous physical presence then it is difficult to reject the external existence of the power outright. Tillotama Rajan notes that Shelley’s poems often ‘uneasily hypostasize mental representation, by using modes of discourse that claim the status of affirmative statement for a vision that is elsewhere conceded to exist only in the subjunctive mood or desire’.41 In ‘Mont Blanc’ Shelley alternates between affirmation and conditional stress, but the dramatic positioning of Shelley as a man within the natural scene that he describes gives the power a living presence that is ‘the experience of one comprehending the other’. The final lines of ‘Mont Blanc’ are a notable inversion of the poetic bathos that Shelley uses at the end of Epipsychidion. The poet is bequeathed apparently ultimate power to give voice to the silent natural world: Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (134–44)   Sally West, Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement (Aldershot, 2007), p. 84.   Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 23. 40

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The rhetorical question is not in the satirical vein of The Triumph of Life, but it cannot be claimed to be a definitive statement of power in the poet’s faculties and an outright assertion of metaphoricity above metaphysics or ontology. To make such an assertion would be to fix the meaning of the poet, and so it is right that the human mind maintains a ‘secret strength’ that may derive from a point of origin other than itself, just as Prometheus guards his own secret that will overthrow tyrants. The lingering trace of the secret is the reason that Charles Vivian’s emphasis on symbiosis should not be rejected for a wholesale deconstructive accent and the reason that Abroon is also right, although she does not go far enough into the actual experience of encountering bathos in the poem. What the inverted bathos of the final three lines sustain is a counter-sublime like the one read in the opening invocation to the ‘everlasting universe of things’. The poem therefore either empties the significance of an external sublime, both transcendent and immanent in Nature or, if we agree that the power is all along merely verbal, then it empties its own processes. Shelley in fact performs a process of daemonisation – not on Milton, but on himself. Either reading is defendable. If we believe Shelley to have given voice to Mont Blanc through poetic brilliance then he has succeeded. Likewise, if we sense a higher order of ‘things’ from which the poet’s powers originate then Shelley has also succeeded. The bathetic ending is a remarkable creation of a selffulfilling prophecy that could only fail to impress if the poem ceased to be read. It would be very hard to read against the grain of Shelley’s poetry, just as it would with the Mariner’s Tale, when indeterminacy is considered to be such a vital constituent of reading. To return to Prometheus Unbound, Stuart Curran is able to argue for the continuing cultural reconstitution of Prometheus’ meaning throughout history. Shelley’s poem is able to unify each historically specific reading: ‘Every representative of a distinct culture may be his own allegorist, but Shelley’s conception is capable of subsuming them all. Prometheus is both part and whole … he is all that man has conceived of him – and more’.42 However, while this may be accurate of Shelley’s Prometheus, I must return to the argument of the present book and maintain that it simply cannot hold true for Satan without leading to a disordering of Milton’s narrative grain. Although Curran refers specifically to the place of Shelley’s Prometheus in the figure’s own mythological history, in the case of Milton’s Satan the part cannot be equivalent to the whole. This is as important in terms of the narrative of Paradise Lost as it is in terms of the cultural reception of Milton’s Satan. When part of Paradise Lost, for example the first two books, or the image of Satan’s dawn, stands in for the meaning of the entire poem there exists a dangerous misalignment of formal priority, which manifests itself as reading against the grain. The reason Shelley’s Prometheus is able to accommodate all other manifestations of Prometheus is because there is no fixed referent and no declared and identifiable argument or purpose to the poem. Shelley’s Asia might be felt as love, but only in an elusive sense. There is also, as I have argued, no 42

 

Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, p. 45.

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pattern of events or progressive narrative to Prometheus Unbound. Indeed, if Weisman’s views are accounted for, the very purpose of Prometheus Unbound is to defeat meaningful interpretation. Shelley’s Prometheus may be abstracted from the poem that holds him and accurately stand as a paradigm for liberation, but Milton’s Satan requires the pressure of the narrative argument of which he is a part to sustain his true nature. Lucy Newlyn, paraphrasing Barbara Lewalski, disagrees: ‘The reader does indeed respond, in such a reading, to Satan as “Faustian hero, degenerating into villain-hero driven by ambition”, to Satan as Romance hero, entering the garden of Eden, to Satan as Achilles, Prometheus, and Odysseus, and to Satan as Macbeth. All these Satans are present, and none of them are reduced by any final act of transvaluation, on Milton’s part, in relation to the traditions from which they are drawn’.43 All these Satans may be present momentarily in Paradise Lost, but Newlyn’s view is a formal distortion which replaces the precedence of the argument of Paradise Lost with moments abstracted from time and left open-ended. It is true that, momentarily Milton’s Satan is related to Odysseus, but to suggest that Satan is Odysseus throughout the narrative as much as he is Satan would surely be wrong. Such a reading would be itself Romantic and subjective, a lyricising of a non-lyrical mode, in which one moment in (or out of) time becomes representative of all time, including past and future. Paradise Lost, and narrative or epic verse in general, cannot function in this way without being read against the grain, without the transitions on which narrative verse is founded being accounted for.

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Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 74.

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Chapter 8

Keats

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents, should be able accurately to state the other ones, both before and after (Conan Doyle, ‘The Five Orange Pips’) And you would explain with ease The obscurer passages, Find me out the prettiest places, The poetic turns, and graces (Charles Lamb, The Sister’s Expostulation)

I It has seemed to me sensible to leave Keats until last because he pushes formal misreading to its logical extreme. As we will see, Keats foregrounds not just the inverted priority of lyrical experience in narrative but also the disintegration of these fragments of subjective meaning under the pressure to relieve poetry of ethical significance. For Keats, as for other Romantic writers, formal reading against the grain was inextricably linked to the supposed ethical misreading of Paradise Lost. Firstly, therefore, it is important to describe Keats’s relationship with Milton in the terms characteristic of these ethics. To do so, I will explore the way in which Milton fits into Keats’s own pattern of aesthetic effects – his poetic philosophy – especially through the well-known ‘Negative Capability’ and the ‘burden of the Mystery’. Keats is at pains to release poetry from the ethical choices implicated in misreading, but the resulting strain on the imagination pushes Keats’s faith in his poetic reserves to breaking point. That Keats saw himself countering the argument of Paradise Lost is undoubtedly true. Stuart Ende, following Brisman and Fish, writes that Milton, ‘is an “either/or” poet, and it is this terrible weight of the necessity of choice (rather than the possibility of reconciliation) that he passes on to later poets’. In a letter to Reynolds dated 3 May 1818, Keats neatly sidesteps the necessity of moral decision, suggesting that even the poetic genius of Milton was, at times, in ‘service to the time being’:  10   Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven and London, 1976), p. 18.

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The Reformation produced such immediate and great benefits, that Protestantism was considered under the immediate eye of heaven, and its own remaining Dogmas and superstitions, then, as it were, regenerated, constituted those resting places and seeming sure points of Reasoning – from that I have mentioned, Milton, whatever he may have thought in the sequel, appears to have been  content with these by his writings.10

The choice that Keats makes is firstly an imaginative one – to avoid ethical choice by dismissing out of hand the rational purpose of Paradise Lost. Like Coleridge, Keats rejects Milton’s argument for its ‘Dogmas’ and ‘superstitions’. He could claim that Milton had achieved a theological ‘resting place’, a ‘sure point’ from where to rationalise his place as a man of Christ. In the same letter Keats’s moral and aesthetic opinions coalesce, or at least arrive at similar points of conclusion. Keats states, ‘When the mind is in its infancy a Bias is in reality a Bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a Bias becomes no Bias’. The rhetoric discloses a desire to destroy the ethical impulse to turn Paradise Lost upside down. Unlike Wordsworth or the other Romantics, Keats rarely addresses the ethics of good and evil, in a relative or absolute sense, although admittedly here the issue is raised twice. The importance lies equally in ‘the poet’s ability to convert loss in the world to subjective gain’, and in relation to the Miltonic moral ‘resting place’. Keats suggests that contemporary conceptions of good and evil have moved beyond those of the theological absolutes of Milton’s Puritanism. Again he refers to the ‘resting place’ of theological certainty: ‘Men had got hold of certain points and resting places in reasoning which were too newly born to be doubted’.10 The ‘resting place’ of Miltonic thought has implications for misreading. The resting places of the mind/imagination are presumably those points of secure intellectual footing – sequences established by, for want of a better explanation, the association of ideas that we have seen Blake and Shelley overturn. These are patterns of thought as Locke or Godwin would understand them – not necessarily idly inherited from traditional thinking – but with ramifications for the continuity that marks narrative and epic poetry. Keats suggests, like Blake, that all models of succesional thought are inadequate in the pursuit of intellectual and imaginative progression (whether these be ideas passed from one generation to the next, part of an individual’s personal mental growth, or the progression of narrative). The significance for my argument is that Keats declares his intention to obliterate the sequences on which rational thought and the argument of Paradise Lost is founded. In narrative’s stead he raises the standard of a primal imaginative immediacy, arrived at independently of earlier ideas – in other words ‘when man is capable of  10    10    10    10  

Letters of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge, 1958), vol. 1, p. 282. LJK, vol. 1, p. 282. Ende, Keats and the Sublime, p. 1. LJK, vol. 1, p. 281.

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being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact  & reason’.10 ‘Mystery’ is perhaps one of the keynotes to stress in Keats’s emphasis on the imagination’s ‘subjective gain’ from the rejection of associationism. Keats’s own ‘thinking principle’, located in ‘the Chamber of Maiden Thought’, is purposefully awakened not by past beliefs but by the kind of Mystery that results from their absence. The ideal result is the ‘possibility of the present becoming discontinuous with the past’. Keats craves an originless imaginative moment with no recourse to a chain of consciousness. Ironically it could be argued of course that the Chamber did provide Keats with a ‘resting place’ of his own and it is debatable whether he could leave once he had arrived: Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages – We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist – We are now in that state – We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’, To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’ and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages.

Michael O’Neill rightly argues that Keats’s letters show him ‘thinking on the hoof, generating categories which it would be wrong to reify’. While this is the case here, I believe ‘the burden of the Mystery’ is a category that endures, like Negative Capability, throughout Keats’s mature thought. In this state man can no longer see the ‘balance of good and evil’. In the hands of Byron or Coleridge this would almost certainly read as a philosophic crisis, but for Keats it is an aesthetic opportunity. Whilst not being concerned with good and evil in the absolute sense with which Milton deals in Paradise Lost, Keats uses the notion as a chance to reveal the imagination at work. Ende rightly argues that ‘one essential distinction between the Romantic enterprise and that of … Milton can be seen in the later poets’ efforts to find and remain at the border of existence at which contrary spheres of existence – emotion and intellect, narcissism and object-love, selfinvestment and ecstasy – are neither opposed (as in Milton …) nor juxtaposed (as in much of Yeats) but joined in a tenuous relationship that often is expressed  10   LJK, vol. 1, p. 193.  10   Ende argues that Milton’s contemplative man is an example of the moment of imaginative renewal that has the power to signify originality: ‘Penseroso turns to the consolations of silence and contemplation, which offer the possibility of the present becoming discontinuous with the past and so comprising a moment of origin’, Keats and the Sublime, p. 11.  10   LJK, vol. 1, p. 281.  10   Michael O’Neill, ‘“When this warm scribe my hand”: writing and history in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge, 1995), p. 159, pp. 143–64.

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oxymoronically’.10 The synthetic Romantic imagination operates, as we have seen with Coleridge’s Mariner, at a level where polarities are self-cancelling. The Mariner is oxymoronically wholly punished and wholly redeemed and there is no more potent an oxymoron in Romantic thinking than ‘Negative Capability’. The result of Keats embracing Negative Capability and ‘the burden of the Mystery’ is that he wholeheartedly rejects verse which forces the reader to respond to authorial intent. As he famously wrote to Reynolds on 3 February 1818, ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us … Poetry should be great & unobtrusive’.11 Paradise Lost is a poem with such a palpable design, although it does not correspondingly turn its back on us if we do not agree with Milton. One of the curious charms of Paradise Lost is its ability to be read against the grain whilst retaining its paradigm, and I think Keats was aware of this. Admittedly he pays some attention to the epic scale of Milton’s achievement: The Genius of Milton, more particularly in respect to its span in immensity, calculated by him, by a sort of birthright, for such an ‘argument’ as the paradise lost – he had an exquisite passion for what is properly in the sense of ease and pleasure poetical Luxury – and with that it appears to me he would fain have been content if he could so doing have preserved his self respect and feel of duty perform’d – but there was working in him as it were that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy’s being accomplished.12

But, while Keats praises Milton’s argument, elevating it above the humbler calling of poetic luxury, I am not sure his focus really falls on the rationale behind the Fall. The lines, as Ende argues, really emphasise Keats’s attraction to the suspension of narrative that moments of ‘Luxury’ might afford: ‘Nor can one help but feel that passion, as it evokes moments in which the heart is comforted by an exquisite dallying’.13 For Keats, Milton’s achievement lay instead in the fragment, because the fragment is a portion of eternity, suggesting an alternative coherence to the argument of Paradise Lost and signifying the Romantic commitment to highly personal vision. The lines from the letter to Reynolds are reminiscent of Shelley’s Preface to The Cenci, and Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as Keats protests against poetry which imposes its own ostentatious merits on the reader: ‘How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!”’.14 Keats is less concerned that a reader may be morally led with the grain – we could go so far as to say that this does not seem to occur to   Ende, Keats and the Sublime, pp. 27–8.   LJK, vol. 1, p. 224. 12   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 71. 13   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 71. 14   LJK, vol. 1, p. 224. 10 11

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him at all – but rather that they might be aesthetically duped. Wordsworth was also troubled with empty aesthetic appeal – his comments on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads make this clear – but the primary point I want to make is that, perhaps surprisingly, Keats is more concerned with the mere verbal orotundity, and absence of ‘concrete realisation’, voiced much later by Eliot and Leavis. Needless to say, Keats does not include Milton in the latter class of authors as Eliot does, offering Il Penseroso as an example of his ‘great & unobtrusive’ verse: ‘Why be teased with “nice Eyed wagtails,” when we have in sight “the Cherub Contemplation”?’15 Beth Lau has commented that ‘Keats appears to have relished the euphony or sound effects of Milton’s verse’ and that he ‘praises the way in which sound echoes sense in the poem. One pattern in Keats’s marking [of his copy of Paradise Lost] that also suggests an appreciation for the sound of words is his frequent underscoring of lists of names and place names’.16 In a similar vein, R.D. Havens remarked that Keats’s first Hyperion borrowed the verbal nuances of Paradise Lost, particularly syntactic inversion, but equally, ‘unbroken series of adjectives, as “nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred”; or a list of proper names’.17 What becomes clear is that Keats did delight in the music of Milton’s verse as Coleridge described it: ‘an efflux; you go along with it’, emphasising the attractiveness of musical flow rather than the logical progression of the argument. In Keats’s annotations to Newton’s edition of Paradise Lost, he also demonstrates his sensitivity to sonic features. The passage ‘on smooth the seal,/ And bended dolphins play’ (PL, VII, 409–10) is marked by Newton, ‘And how smooth is the verse that describes the seal and dolphin sporting upon the smooth water!’ Keats rightly corrects Newton, ‘by no means – the [sounds?] are particularly ful [sic] of consonants’.18 It appears, then, that Keats did not quite share the same concerns as Wordsworth and the other Romantics that a moral message might be confused with the poetic quality of Paradise Lost. The ‘Bias’ he wrote of to Reynolds is more openly an aesthetic issue as Paul Sherwin confirms, ‘Milton and Wordsworth represent distinct imaginative biases, but Keats is hoping to comprehend them within an angle of vision so wide that bias is eliminated’ [italics added].19 Sherwin suggests that Keats did want to eliminate a brand of misreading but of a slightly different order. Nevertheless, he voices again the core Romantic value of a presiding and unifying intellect that might accommodate all philosophies within itself – in other words the mind of the poet at work. As with Wordsworth’s imagination, Coleridge’s ‘One Life’, Shelley’s visionary splendour, or Blake’s ‘Poetic and Prophetic character’,   LJK, vol. 1, p. 224.   Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, 1998), p. 45. 17   Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (New York, 1961), p. 205. 18   ROM, p. 545. 19   Paul Sherwin, ‘Dying into Life: Keats’s Struggle with Milton in Hyperion’, PMLA 93 (1978): 384, 383–95. 15 16

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the primary Romantic urge is to unify or transcend factionalism. Having made this point it is also apparent that, as in Coleridge’s case, Keats falls prey to his lack of a sustained mythology. How, then, without an overtly Christian mythology, did Keats intend to produce his own ‘angle of vision so wide’? I would suggest that the required visionary perspective is to be found in, or rather suggested by, ‘the burden of the Mystery’. Appropriately, Keats’s tone, in the later letter to Reynolds, prevents the reader from being entirely convinced that this is indeed a burden or anxiety – the mood is, as with Coleridge, one of positive exploration. Meg Harris Williams has described the investigative urge as a spirit of poetic ‘adventure’ – ‘his Genius is explorative’20 – and argues it is characteristic of both Keats and Milton. It has long been noted that Keats’s strongest verse maintains something similar to this mystery or is at least attracted towards it. One only has to scan Endymion to find the effects of such moments of mystery. In the following case they are appropriately produced by music: ’Twas even so with this Dew-dropping melody, in the Carian’s ear; First heaven, then hell, and then forgotten clear, Vanish’d in elemental passion. (II, 372–5)21

These are what we might describe as typical effects of ‘the burden of the Mystery’; that is the burden which is manifested not as a burden but, rather, as a poetic device, allowing the poet to exist at Ende’s ‘border of existence’. Unlike Byron’s Manfred, Keats’ emphasis falls on forgetting as something to be achieved rather than desired. Imaginative immersion is accompanied by the loss of heaven and hell from Endymion’s memory. His mental dislocation enacts the absence, albeit momentarily, of moral significance. As has become increasingly apparent, from Blake through to Keats, the contraries of good and evil are always felt to be the ultimate root of ethical readings made against the grain of Paradise Lost. Ethics here are jettisoned from a moment that is primarily visionary, releasing the reader, and Endymion, from the pressures of thought. Rather than experiencing, then, the anxiety and the Byronic guilt-complex that we have seen associated with the origin of good and evil, Keats is positively relaxed in his treatment of theological ambiguities. To quote again from the letter to Reynolds, ‘We see not the balance of good and evil’. The moral problem leads not to psychological trauma, but to a positive assertion that ethical and spiritual answers must be replaced by an imaginative uncertainty if knowledge is to be advanced and the dark Wordsworthian passages beyond the ‘Chamber of Maiden   Meg Harris Williams, Inspiration in Milton and Keats (London, 1982), p. 45. Williams also argues that Milton’s relationship with his muse progresses from passive to active. She argues the verse of both Milton and Keats is ‘poetry as the exploration (rather than recollection) of experience’. 21   The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London, 1978), pp. 143–4. 20

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Thought’ are to be explored. To quote Coleridge again: ‘As soon as [the mind] is fixed on one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination’. Of course, if the reader is of a Byronic, rather than Coleridgean, temperament, he must feel slightly cheated at this point and view Keats’s as yet unexplored ‘dark passages’ as a retreat from the point at which things were beginning to get morally interesting. Arguably what the reader really wants to know next is what replaces the ‘hintings at good and evil’ in Paradise Lost. Does this mean that we are wrong to see Milton’s Satan as evil? Or wrong to apply moral judgement at all in the reading process? These are the questions which Keats, for one, is not concerned to provide any answers. His temperament is aesthetic and indeed the letter to Reynolds suggests that Keats sees the very suspension of moral categories and decisions as an end in itself. II Having established that Keats advocated the immersion of the rational mind in mystery we might now define ‘the burden’ more precisely and consider its efficacy. That Keats adduces Wordsworth is, I think, significant. Earlier in the same letter to Reynolds he ponders on Wordsworth’s suitability as an epic poet, a recurring anxiety of Keats’s own. We should consider that Keats voices some of his own poetic concerns through his opinions of Wordsworth, particularly in ‘how he differs from Milton’: And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Miltons [sic] apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song.22

It is clear that Sherwin is right to differentiate between the imaginative strengths of Wordsworth and Milton in Keats’s thought; Keats draws an implicit distinction between the attributes of an epic poet and the ability of the lyricist to see into the human heart. There also appears to be a sense that Keats desires to follow Milton, rather than Wordsworth, into the regions of epic song but is not quite sure how far he can go. Keats had already voiced the pertinent question in a letter to James Rice of 24 March: ‘Did Milton do more good or [harm] to the world?’23 A reader might be inclined to turn the question around and ask did Milton do more harm than good to John Keats? In the letter to Rice such a burden is tangibly apparent. Rather than craving the kind of uncertainties that might activate the imagination to search the passages beyond the ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’, Keats desires the opposite: 22

   

23

LJK, vol. 1, pp. 278–9. LJK, vol. 1, p. 255.

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‘What a happy thing it would be if we could settle our thoughts, make our minds up on any matter in five Minutes and remain content – that is to build a sort of mental Cottage of feelings quiet and pleasant – to have a sort of Philosophical Back Garden’.24 I would argue that the ‘mental Cottage’ could be seen as the antithesis of the ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’, something actually more akin to the Miltonic ‘resting place’ previously dismissed. But, when Keats appears to contradict himself in prose, advocating the Chamber on one occasion and the mental Cottage on another, it is primarily an imaginative issue and has little to do with the problem of personal responsibility as experienced by Milton and Byron. In an imaginative, rather than a moral, sense ‘the burden of the Mystery’ encountered in the Chamber is a very real burden and is linked to the harm that Milton might do rather than to the imaginative potentiality that Wordsworth discloses. This is the burden that dogged Keats throughout most of his poetic life. By attempting to transcend the poetic limits of the moral grain of Paradise Lost, Keats generates an imaginative anxiety that stalks his best verse – whether the imagination is really activated by the ethical indeterminacy it prescribes. The most famous phrasing of the burden is Keats’s theory of Negative Capability or, more specifically, the receptive form of Negative Capability experienced by the reader or in the passage I quoted from Endymion. This could involve the removal of a moral or political plane of reference in reading poetry; in other words, it could mean that the reader should not search for details beyond the poem itself as they lead away from its own immediate aesthetic merits. But the questions that follows are: ‘does this necessarily involve the stimulation of the mind’s imaginative faculties?’ ‘Could it not also achieve their retarding?’ Negative Capability has traditionally been viewed as the strength of Keats’s greatest verse, but it is also a weakness because of its instability. Does Negative Capability prompt, on the one hand, the imaginative suggestiveness that characterises the Chamber of Maiden Thought or does it describe, on the other, the ‘resting place’ for the aesthetic immersion of the imagination? For Keats, mystery or ambiguity in poetry is perhaps the most amenable means to achieving both ends, and it is here that the poet is faced with a problem. Williams believes that Keats struggled throughout his poetic career to understand the distinction between the true and false poet: ‘why I should be a Poet more than other Men – seeing how great a thing it is’.25 R.D. Havens proposed a similar argument as regards Keats’s attempts to compose the Hyperion poems, and we are certainly again privy to the real anguish that we saw in Keats’s aesthetic relationship with Milton when he writes in another letter to Reynolds: There were too many Miltonic inversions in it – Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out   LJK, vol. 1, p. 254.   Williams, Inspiration in Milton and Keats, p. 10.

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some lines from Hyperion and put a mark × to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one  to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul, ’twas imagination I cannot make the distinction.26

Keats’s overt problem seems to involve the stylistic similarities between Hyperion and Paradise Lost. However, Havens has rightly suggested that the problem and anxiety must run deeper than this, especially as Keats’s revision of the Fall of Hyperion did not exclude the Miltonic inversions of syntax: ‘Before recasting it he evidently came to realize how much deeper than these matters of expression the real trouble lay, and seems to have become quite indifferent to them’.27 Havens was uncertain just where the problem really lay. But Keats’s own language supports the argument of Williams, especially his reference to false beauty as opposed to true, the former surely emanating from the false poet. A letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817 confirms Keats’s imaginative anxieties: ‘the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness’. The letter reinforces that it is the mind’s own working, prompted by a moment of mystery, in which Keats declares delight. Ambiguity can be viewed as a means to this end, but this is not the same effect as the Negative Capability of Endymion. In this case the mind is teased ‘out of thought’ – stops thinking altogether – the very opposite of the mind delighting in its own workings. Endymion’s situation is much closer to the safety zone of the mental Cottage. There is, then, some discrepancy in the effects of Negative Capability; it is on the one hand an ambiguity that activates the mind and on the other an ambiguity that disengages it. Ambiguity is also central to Keats’s reading of Paradise Lost. As Beth Lau has pointed out in examining Keats’s marginalia to Milton’s epic, ‘Several of Keats’s notes celebrate the effects of obscurity or indistinctness in Paradise Lost’.28 Lucy Newlyn makes the related point that ‘Linguistic indeterminacy is thereby made a function of imaginative potency’.29 However, both critics support the notion that Keats’s ‘Mysteries’ promote imaginative vigour when, I would argue, this does not always seem to be the case. Keats believed that Milton had explored the dark passages of ‘the burden of the Mystery’, but was concerned that he could not follow that lead. For the reader, a similar scenario is explained by Lau: ‘uncertainty or indefiniteness in poetry is appealing: it activates and empowers the reader’s imagination to complete what the text only sketchily provides’.30 But is this true of the picture of Endymion rapt by music? Equally, is it true of the famous opening of Hyperion. Saturn is described as follows: ‘His old right hand lay nerveless, 26

    28   29   30   27

LJK, vol. 2, p. 167. Havens, The Influence of Milton, p. 211. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 49. Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, p. 8. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 49.

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listless, dead,/ Unsceptered; and his realmless eyes were closed (18–19).31 This is another type of Negative Capability, although the image itself is more coherent than those which purposefully defeat rational categories, such as Moneta’s face. Nevertheless, like the Urn or the Nightingale, its immediate effect is not to activate the mind, but to provide the comforting numbness of Keats’s greatest verse, to ‘tease us out of thought’ not into it. It is a moment of release in which we feel only the pain of Saturn and do not search for fact or reason behind it. Of course, full explanation for an opening scene is often delayed in narrative, and in this case we are led to understand Saturn’s listlessness. But, the first effect Keats strives to achieve is the release of the imagination from thought. In Keats’s verse the effects of ambiguity are often so ecstatic as to offer a character an out of body experience, being ex stasis, so to speak. The verse operates on the mind of the reader as that upon the festal group at the opening of Endymion: And then in quiet circles did they press The hillock turf, and caught the latter end Of some strange history, potent to send A young mind from its bodily tenement. (I, 322–5)

The concept might be better understood in the context of Keats’s opinions on the Burkean sublime and this receptive, as opposed to creative, form of Negative Capability. As I have argued, in his letter to Reynolds, Keats was concerned with not only the nature of mystery itself but also the corresponding Burkean diminution of the human faculties. In a letter to his brother Tom he describes his own personal conception of the sublime, motivated partially by the reminiscence of Milton’s river in Eden with ‘mazy error under pendant shades (PL, IV, 239): ‘I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely – I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest’.32 Typically for the poet of Sensations rather than Thoughts, Keats goes beyond both Burke and Hazlitt in the reduction of the human faculties and disappears from the scene completely. By becoming purely a sense – the Romantic ‘eye’ rather than Cartesian ‘I’ – Keats describes a state of Negative Capability. This is often the case with Endymion, although the moment is usually only temporary: There, when new wonders ceas’d to float before, And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore The journey homeward to habitual self! (II, 274–6)

Endymion loses his vision, just as Keats cannot sustain his own communion with the Nightingale. 31

   

32

JKP, p. 329. Keats substitutes ‘over’ for ‘under’, LJK, vol. 1, pp. 300–301.

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It is difficult, then, to establish for certain whether Keats really desired to explore the dark passages beyond the fringe of Wordsworth’s song. The comfort of a state of Negative Capability also held great appeal, but the attractiveness lay in the fact that a poetic moment could be originless – not dependent for its source on past sequences of thought as narrative verse must be. Equally, of little doubt is the assertion that Milton had been there first, and that this means that Keats read against the grain of Paradise Lost. The result of Keats’s rejection of Milton’s ‘Dogmas’ or rhetoric, is the consequent privileging of Milton as a Romantic and subjective figure whose achievement was more in terms of lyric than narrative. For Keats, the charm of Paradise Lost may well lie in the opening of the poem, but also in the isolated moment that might tease the mind from its thought, providing ‘the intense pleasure of not knowing’. This is certainly the dominant theme of Keats’s marginalia to Paradise Lost. The discrepancy between the activation and immersion of the imagination, which I have discussed above, is also more markedly revealed. Keats manoeuvres himself into what appears to be a contradictory position, one that goes a long way to explaining his inability to complete the Hyperion poems. Lau comments that one of the main themes recurring in Keats’s notes and markings of his two-volume edition is that of contrasts, ‘the conflict between duty and luxury, as well as descriptions of odours, both sweet and noisome, of gentle and tremendous sounds, and of delicious and disgusting tastes’.33 However, possibly the most important contrast of all is found in Keats’s own famous comments on ‘The Magnitude of Contrast’ and the pleasure of not knowing in Paradise Lost. Two types of reaction are inspired, the first that we have seen activating the mind, while the other short-circuits the imagination: There is a greatness which the Paradise Lost possesses over every other Poem – the Magnitude of Contrast and that is softened by the contrast being ungrotesque to a degree – Heaven moves on like music throughout – Hell is also peopled with angels it also move[s] on like music not grating and ha[r]sh but like a grand accompaniment in the Base of Heaven.34

That ‘the Magnitude of Contrast’ is ungrotesque recalls Keats’s comments on the difference between affected verse and that which is ‘great & unobtrusive’. What Keats suggests is that the contrasts in Paradise Lost are similar to the marrying of discordant elements in music. Beyond structural elements however, Keats rightly suggests that the narrative abounds with contrasts and clarifies examples in a further note to the martial description of the company of Hell moving, ‘in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood’: The light and shade – the sort of black brightness – the ebon diamonding – the ethiop Immortality – the sorrow, the pain the sad-sweet Melody – the Phalanges 33

   

34

Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 60. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 71.

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of Spirits so depressed as to be ‘uplifted beyond hope’ – the short mitigation of Misery – the thousand Melancholies and Magnificences of this Page – leaves no room for anything to be said thereon but: ‘so it is – ’35

Again the ordered contrasts of ‘Melody’ are important to Keats, but more specifically we find the oxymoronic ‘sad-sweet’ conjunction that Keats was to employ so expertly in the Odes and should recall Ende’s belief that Romantic oxymoron always hints at the suspension of choice. What is most striking of all, however, is the bathetic effect of this string of ‘Magnificences’ on the reader; ‘so it is’. What Keats meant by this conclusion must have been that, as far as he was concerned, very little, if anything, could be added to this passage of Paradise Lost. This is without doubt his primary meaning. Yet, there is another sense of ‘so it is’ which should not pass ignored. I think that the reader cannot help but be reminded of the state of Negative Capability in which the mind feels no irritable reaching, the state that teases out of thought and perhaps out of body as well. This is the mind, which finds its own type of ‘resting place’, not moral, but aesthetic. III Keats famously desired mostly sensations rather than thoughts, although in the case of what he terms ‘the philosophic Mind’, qualifications are needed: ‘To such a mind, sensations alone are not sufficient’. Recast in other terms, Negative Capability is not sufficient, or at least not practically sustainable, to the philosophic Mind as it eventually proves insufficient to Endymion: sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind – one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits – who would exist partly on sensation partly on thought – to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind.36

Here, Keats voices in prose a central concern of the Odes: ‘Forlorn’, appropriately a word that Keats almost certainly took from Milton, tolls him back from sensations to thoughts in the Nightingale Ode, and the same could be said here.37 Keats is   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 339.   LJK, vol. 1, p. 186. 37   Keats uses the word ‘forlorn’ with its associations of hunting in Endymion: ‘mellow reeds are touched with sounds forlorn/ By the dim echoes of old Triton’s horn’ (I, 225–6). He also uses the phrase ‘like a bell’ in the Nightingale Ode, but here the sense of hunting is secondary to that of the loss of rapturous congregation with the nightingale, ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!’ ‘Forlorn’ is used powerfully to evoke loss and a sense of an aesthetic ‘Fall’ by Milton in his invocation to Urania in Book seven of Paradise Lost, ‘on the Aleian field I fall/ Erroneous, there to 35

36

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tolled back from a state of Negative Capability, and feels the need to acknowledge the temporal, the ‘seeming sure points of reasoning’. Keats would appear, then, to establish something of an intellectual opposition in his prose. On the one hand there is the fatherless moment of Negative Capability or the burden of the Mystery; on the other there is the mind that is careful of its fruits, retaining its intellectual resting places. But, the two are philosophically incompatible, and, for Keats, one defeats the other. While he acknowledges the necessity of the resting places to the ‘philosophic Mind’, it is Negative Capability or ‘the burden of the Mystery’, inherited from Wordsworth, which we have seen hold most poetic appeal for Keats. However, privileging imaginative immediacy over logical sequences of thought does not only prevent reading against the moral grain of poetry. As I have argued earlier, the attempt to liberate a text from politics or religion plays into the hands of another facet of Romantic readings – the formal misreading also present in the work of the first generation Romantics. In the case of Keats, the tendency can be discussed at length, as it is marked and easily identifiable due to the existence of the marginal annotations to the poet’s two volume edition of Paradise Lost. Keats writes of Milton: ‘One of the most mysterious of semispeculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another’.38 The marginalia, whilst offering a chance to follow a Romantic reader at work, also present an opportunity to turn ‘semi-speculation’ into harder fact and examine the formal processes of reading against the grain. As I have argued, Keats’s primary anxiety with Milton was that the imagination would flounder in the company of his precursor, unable to rise to the challenge of ‘the burden of the Mystery’. The result of Keats’s deliberate rejection of commonplace ethics is the privileging of just such an imaginative sphere in which the poet felt in competition with Milton. Keats was destined to come off second best in terms of writing narrative. The effects of his own verse were such that he could not always distinguish between them – between the activation and the immersion of the mind, the false and true poet. Part of the reason for this was that Keats’s rejection of one facet of reading against the grain led, almost inevitably, to the endorsement of another. The marginalia to Paradise Lost confirm that Keats’s reading habits were to read against the grain in a formal sense, by selecting parts of the text at the expense of the whole, and certainly at the expense of Milton’s argument. Without a presiding argument, or established symbolic order, of his own, Keats would never be able to complete his own Hyperion narratives. Keats’s process of underscoring particular lines during reading reveals certain thematic preoccupations and a corresponding neglect of Milton’s narrative. The presiding factor in each marginal note is a selective reading in which meaning is established by, suitably for Keats, moments abstracted from the poem. One such recurring pattern of abstraction, which Lau has pointed out, is an attraction to wander and forlorn’ (VII, 19–20). The line is underscored by Keats in his copy of the poem (Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 137). 38   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 74.

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facial expressions; these are particularly useful in defining the pattern of formal misreading. Satan is of especial interest, and Keats underscores and includes in a note the line in which Satan ‘throws round his baleful eyes’.39 It is no coincidence then that Endymion and Hyperion abound with descriptions of eyes. In the case of Milton’s Satan the depiction comes at a point where we could describe a Magnitude of contrast or even a moment of mystery: for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes, That witness’d huge affliction and dismay Mix’d with obdurate pride and steadfast hate At once, as far as Angel’s ken, he views The dismal situation waste and wild. (PL, I, 54–60)40

The contrasts abound in this passage: the feeling of happiness and pain, the significance of past and present time to the narrative, and the positive moral associations of pride and the negative associations of hate. It is perhaps important, though, that of these lines, Keats underscores only those that I have italicized – a selective reading contrary to the flow of the verse. These lines are concerned with movement and place. The sense of place in Paradise Lost is one that struck Keats powerfully: ‘There is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems, more particularly where the action begins’. Lau has noted Keats’s praise for Milton’s ‘stationing or statu[a]ry’, a phrase which derives from theories of the plastic arts, in this case the ‘dismal situation waste and wild’.41 This explains the powerful sense of stationing in Hyperion and the abundance of pictorial scenes, no more obviously displayed than in Saturn and Thea captured ‘Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’ (I, 86). Yet, of equal importance in the passage above are the lines that Keats does not underscore. If we compare this to the references to eyes in Endymion and Hyperion, an important distinction between Milton and Keats can be made. Endymion is set apart from those telling stories: Thus all out-told Their fond imaginations, – saving him Whose eyelids curtain’d up their jewels dim, Endymion. (I, 392–5)   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, pp. 73 and 102.   Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 73. 41   Beth Lau, ‘Keats’s marginalia in Paradise Lost’, in Milton, the metaphysicals, and romanticism, ed. Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (Cambridge, 1994), p. 153, pp. 151– 71. See also Nancy Goslee, ‘“Under a Cloud in Prospect”: Keats, Milton, and Stationing’, in PQ, 53 (1974): 205–19. 39 40

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Similarly Saturn is, to all intents and purposes, alone at the beginning of Hyperion, ‘his realmless eyes were closed’. The immediate difference between Milton and Keats is the presence or absence of motion, despite Keats underscoring the movement of Satan’s eyes. While Satan’s eyes move round those of Endymion and Saturn are firmly closed. Even the approach of Thea fails to prompt what the reader would call action: Saturn, sleep on: – O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumberous solitude? Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? (I, 68–70)

An image that in Paradise Lost was truly accompanied by the Miltonic Magnitude of contrast to which Keats was so powerfully drawn becomes a moment of Negative Capability for both characters and reader alike. Partly, this must be due to Keats’s formal readings against the grain of Paradise Lost – Keats selects certain facets from Milton (the eyes and the stationing) but rejects others (the importance of time to the narrative, and the moral valency of Satan). While it would be wrong to say that this is always the case, Lau’s identification of these patterns is clearly correct. Although I have argued that Coleridge and Blake elect the partial moment over and above the unified argument of Milton’s narrative, it appears that Keats goes even further desiccating the coherence of localised moments within the text. Appropriately, Endymion is set apart from those who ‘out-told/ Their fond imaginations’; the implication being that Endymion is, like Saturn, thoughtless and even beyond thought. It could be argued then that a lack of motion in verse inhibits the imaginative activity that Keats craved. Several critics have addressed this lack of motion in Hyperion, and this is undoubtedly the ostensible reason why Hyperion is unlike Paradise Lost. Sherwin rightly argues that Hyperion is a collection of static scenes that inhibit the progression of the narrative: ‘Despite Keats’s intentions, Hyperion is an unmoving sequence of liminal moments’.42 Havens argued that ‘A careful study of the poem leaves one with the feeling that Keats did not know just what to do with his characters or how to get them doing anything, that he could create gods but could not make them act’.43 But Lau makes the most important point; the lack of motion is an indication of Keats’s formal reading against the grain of Milton: ‘The imbalance of Keats’s attention to description over dialogue and other major structural or thematic elements of Paradise Lost therefore may represent a rejection or disregard of Milton’s classical style, a rejection that, in its challenge to literary tradition, is just as subversive as an attack on Milton’s Christian orthodoxy’.44 In the light of Keats’s own eagerness to compose successful narrative poetry, it might be too strong to say that he makes a conscious challenge to narrative verse. It must be admitted, however, that, conscious or unconscious, 42

    44   43

Sherwin, ‘Dying into Life’, p. 386. Havens, The Influence of Milton, p. 209. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 48.

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Keats undoubtedly does read against the grain of Milton’s classical style and that this transfers to the stalled progress of Hyperion. Just as Keats denies the philosophical resting places, or the mind careful of its fruits, he would also appear to disregard, intentionally or not, the sequences of thought, and the coherence of images, on which Paradise Lost is founded, at the expense of the immediacy of imaginative moments. The structure of the narrative in Paradise Lost, indeed the form of narrative full stop, can be related to the ‘sure points of reasoning’. Keats rejected ‘resting places’, primarily because they were indicative of sequential models of thinking, such as those identified by Godwin. He may well qualify this by suggesting that a mind must also ‘be careful of its fruits’, but the emphasis always falls on the apparently fatherless moment of Negative Capability. Sequential narrative does not necessarily deny the immediate poetic epiphany that has the potential to create moments of mystery or Negative Capability, but it does not function in this way alone. If Paradise Lost were to surrender its temporality to epiphany it would become a lyrical experience like the Mariner’s Tale. Keats is more successful in writing the great Odes, because they are not dependent upon the extensive transitions to which narrative verse is bound; instead they exist entirely in, and for, the present moment. If Lau is to be believed, and the selective pattern of Keats’s reading bears her point out, then Keats read narrative as a broken series of pictures, even as a series of broken pictures, and not as a successive sequence of a story or argument. As I have frequently asserted, narrative verse, and Paradise Lost in particular, depends upon transitions – the acknowledgment of past crimes and of the future recompense. But, such formal workings, tied to the temporal, deny the primacy of the moment of Negative Capability or ‘the burden of the Mystery’, which always attempts to defeat the significance of past and future. Negative Capability is, perhaps, the ultimate antagonist to both the association of ideas and, more importantly as regards this study, narrative verse. When Keats fails to acknowledge the passing of time in his allusion to the eyes of Milton’s Satan, he makes, as Lau suggests, a reading against the grain of the narrative. Paul Sherwin goes on to make this very point, interestingly using the terms of my own study: ‘In the first two books [of Hyperion], where he respects, however guardedly his continuity with Milton, Keats writes self-consciously, yet powerfully, against the grain’.45 To argue that Keats wrote against the aesthetic grain of Paradise Lost, if only in the first two books, actually contradicts, as I have pointed out, the reasons that Keats himself declared to be the cause of the abandonment of the Hyperion poems: ‘I have given up Hyperion – there were too many Miltonic inversions in it’. Keats’s own opinion, or rather the opinion he voices, is that his poem too closely resembled Paradise Lost, in terms of style. But, there is more than a grain of truth in Sherwin’s argument, and his opinion that Hyperion is, in fact, unlike Paradise Lost, seems the correct one. 45

 

Sherwin, ‘Dying into Life’, p. 386.

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Keats’s Hyperion fragments are, despite the poet’s protestations to the contrary, quite different to Paradise Lost, and the reason is the poet’s reading against the grain. The habits of Keats’s reading of Milton are naturally transferred to his poetry, but in terms of structure as much as style. In Hyperion the primarily spatial verse is often tinged with, and sometimes even arises out of, the sense that Keats has arrived too late in the day, as he himself acknowledges in the Preface to Endymion: ‘I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness’.46 Yet, it is not the creation of Grecian deities with which Keats struggles; it is arriving after Milton, and specifically after the completion of Milton’s story. Many critics have drawn a parallel between Eve’s meal in Book five of Paradise Lost (a passage underscored by Keats in his marginalia) and the meal at the opening of The Fall of Hyperion: Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, Which nearer seen, seem’d refuse of a meal By Angel tasted, or our Mother Eve; For empty shells were scattered on the grass, And grape stalks but half bare and remnants more, Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know. (I, 28–34)

Keats captures the sensuality of Milton’s own scene. The passage appeals seemingly because of its emphasis on the senses, and this is significantly linked to the uncertainty of ‘I could not know’, a type of Negative Capability. The senses are prioritized over the workings of the mind – in itself a factor that distances the reader from the significance of the narrative. In this case, however, the most striking aspect of the passage is actually a type of oxymoronic pleasure and pain deriving from the absence of the senses, particularly the absence of taste; ‘By Angel tasted’ and not the narrator. ‘Sweet smelling’, only serves to distance the reader and narrator from this lack of taste, the primary sense involved. The image is a static scene, which is then lost due to the furthering of the poem. I could compare the structure of the passage to Milton’s initial apostrophe to Urania. I have suggested that the clause ‘already in me’ was read by Shelley as a momentary gap in the narrative that was lost, but not forgotten by the Romantic imagination, once Milton’s argument had moved on. In the case of the opening of Hyperion, however, the difference is that the stasis is only replaced by another form of stasis. The scene is not furthered by the progression of narrative or action, but by a classical allusion, another technique that retards narrative: ‘Still was more plenty than the fabled horn/ Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting/ For Proserpine’ (I, 35–7). The overriding impression is one of having arrived too late in the day, or on the terms of narrative, after the action is over. 46

 

JKP, p. 103.

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Having made this point, however, it is also true that here is a sense we may equally have arrived too early. I feel as though Keats is in limbo, suspended between two narratives, both of which he has read against. As much as anything, this seems the reason for the mood of stasis in the Hyperion poems, captured in the description of Thea: There was a listening fear in her regard, As if calamity had but begun; As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder labouring up. (I, 37–41)

Characters and reader alike are trapped between ‘spent malice’ and the ‘thunder labouring up’ which is never to be released in verse. Keats reveals himself to be the poet of potential rather than kinetic energy. The anxiety that Keats cannot move from stasis to narrative is felt on every level – as in the Ode on Melancholy, stasis is to be feared. Such ‘slow time’ does indeed produce the state of forgetfulness, even the state of Negative Capability, as I have argued. Keats’s opening anti-apostrophe, ‘No, no, go not to Lethe’, is appropriately made to the river of forgetting, offering an interesting crib to Keats’s muse in The Fall of Hyperion. There is a curious masochism in the fact that Keats chooses Moneta or memory, when he desires to escape from the influence of Milton, and the pressures of Miltonic narrative. Although Keats allows the incitement to action to his characters, he neglects to offer himself the same spur. The lines that Saturn speaks to Thea reverberate with a desperation felt by fallen God and poet alike: ‘Search, Thea, search!/ Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round’ (I, 116–7). The reference to the goddess’ eyes recalls Milton’s Satan even more directly this time, yet it is the invocation to movement rather than the movement itself that is presented. Keats could not complete the narrative of Hyperion when such moments of poetic epiphany dominated his thought. Unlike Milton, the passages beyond ‘the burden of the Mystery’ are not explored because the Magnitude of Contrast is never translated into narrative verse – the Miltonic glass is smashed by Keats’s fragmented reading and only isolated shards remain to suggest the lost coherence of Paradise Lost and the forever unrealised unity of Hyperion. As in the case of the Mariner’s Tale, it would be difficult to read against the grain of the Hyperion poems as there is too little of a coherent mythology constructed. It is not entirely absent, but is present more as an idea or notion of progress. To momentarily consider the poems in terms of deconstructionism: ‘Critical to this procedure is the assumption that the text itself provides us with the tools we are to use in deconstructing it’.47 The Hyperion poems do not provide these tools. In fact, Hyperion is directly opposed to one of the most prominent factors in explaining the reason for reading against   Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 16. 47

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the grain of Paradise Lost. It is useful to refer to the eighteenth-century Miltonist, Daniel Webb’s description of ‘why the principal beauties in Paradise Lost, have been naturally thrown on the person of Satan’.48 Webb argues that ‘To describe a permanent or unchangeable glory, is to paint without shades; the sun is more delightful in its setting than in its meridian’.49 Whether or not he is right as far as Keats is concerned is debateable: few would argue that the permanence of the Grecian Urn is without its shades. But the importance of temporal alteration and transition cannot be ignored as regards Hyperion. As has been argued, the poem is largely without transition, which, to follow Webb’s argument, does not sustain poetic interest or activate the imagination. Put simply, Satan is a more poetic character than Milton’s God because he alters. This is exactly what we have seen Keats admire in Paradise Lost – the Magnitude of Contrast – but reject in his reading against the grain. Keats makes a similar point to that of Webb in a letter to Jane and Mariane Reynolds on 14 September 1817, ‘dont [sic] you think there is something extremely fine after sunset when there are a few white Clouds about and a few stars blinking – when the waters are ebbing and the Horison [sic] a Mystery?’50 The emphasis here does rest on a moment of transition, but is notably accompanied by the now familiar sense of mystery. I would suggest that the Miltonic mystery is also a moment of transition. One of Keats’s favourite poetic places was a mist, and it is appropriate that, like Burke and Shelley, Keats was impressed by the transitional moment in Paradise Lost when Satan’s former glory is envisaged as a sun ‘shorn of its beams’. He underscores the lines we have already encountered in which Satan ‘perplexes monarchs’. The Miltonic mist displays the Magnitude of Contrast that prompts the imagination, the light and shade. More than this though, it involves a definite sense of progression, and more particularly the acknowledgement of the process of time in the narrative, the one factor that Negative Capability must deny – Miltonic mystery involves narrative transition. For both Byron and Shelley the passage appeared to have stimulated a sense of the majesty of Satan’s unfallen state. The mist that shrouds the character’s fallen form only partially obscures the original grandeur. In other words, this stimulates the active mind to search into Satan’s origins and complete the image – to acknowledge the transition. Both writers do complete this image in their own way. But for Keats, the emphasis is on the mist itself as he comments in a note on Milton’s use of the word ‘vales’ in Heaven and Hell, ‘It is a sort of delphic Abstraction a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist’.51 When Keats comes to use mist in narrative it is, suitably, associated with his failure as an epic poet: 48

    50   51   49

Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross, p. 410. Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross, p. 410. LJK, vol. 1, pp. 158–9. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 77.

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Apollo! Faded, far flown Apollo! Where is thy misty pestilence to creep Into the dwellings, through the door crannies, Of all mock lyrists, large self worshippers, And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse. (I, 204–8) [italics added]

His use of the Miltonic verb ‘perplexes’ is also invariably tinged with fear of loss and not the faded glory with which Byron used it. Hyperion is described as ‘yet unsecure,/ For as upon the Earth dire prodigies/ Fright and perplex, so also shudders he’ (Hyperion, I, 168–70). Keats does pull off a wonderful moment of the Magnitude of Contrast here, which directly echoes the clouded sun of Milton’s Satan: His palace bright, Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold, And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks, Glares a blood red through all the thousand courts. (I, 176–9)

These lines are truly worthy of the Milton that Keats admired, activating the mind with the threat of action, even though action itself is still largely absent. But, typically the image is also accompanied by description that recalls the static and nerveless hand of Saturn: ‘horrors portioned to a giant nerve/ Make great Hyperion ache’ (I, 175–6). As with Saturn, the ambiguity of the horrors and the prioritizing of the sense ‘ache’ serves to produce a moment of Negative Capability. Beth Lau concludes her introduction to Keats’s marginalia of Paradise Lost as follows: ‘One might conclude that Keats read Milton through the filter of his own identity and projected his own concerns onto Milton’s text, as reader-response theorists such as Norman N. Holland believe all readers do. Or, to use a different paradigm, Harold Bloom’s theory of literary influence, one could say that Keats misreads his strong precursor in a way that turns Paradise Lost into a Keatsian poem’.52 Although she does not subscribe wholeheartedly to the view, in the light of this chapter, it would be difficult to disagree with the summation. Lau comments that Lucy Newlyn more openly advocates a reading in which the Romantic poets ‘recognized these qualities in – as opposed to projecting these qualities onto – Milton’s text’.53 In one sense Paradise Lost could be said to express a tendency to be read in a fragmented way – this would make the poem a series of lyrical moments, like Hyperion itself, rather than a sustained narrative argument. If a reader is of a Bloomian persuasion, seeing no poems as such, only relationships between poems and poets, then this argument carries much weight. I believe, however, that the evidence of this chapter, and those that have preceded it, points elsewhere. Paradise Lost does have a textual integrity of its own, in the form of 52

   

53

Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 67. Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost, p. 67.

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Milton’s narrative, and does not take its meaning wholly in relation to its ephebes. I would argue that Keats read against the formal grain of Paradise Lost whilst attempting to protect the text from the moralist, or ill-educated reader, who might mistake or destroy its beauty. But I believe that it is also important to recognise that Keats transferred these reading habits into his own attempts to produce epic poetry that would stand alongside that of Paradise Lost. His reading against the grain prevented the realisation of his major poetic ambitions – to write the great post-Miltonic epic.

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Chapter 9

Milton in the Twentieth Century

Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. (John, 6:12) Reading my verses, I liked them so well, Self-love did make my judgment to rebel (Margaret Cavendish, ‘The Poetess’s Hasty Complaint’)

I In the introduction to this book I quoted from Stevie Davies when she wrote that the reception history of Paradise Lost is ‘the history of the tribe’. What the phrase means is that Paradise Lost perhaps more than any other work of literature has evaded a consensus of opinion whilst continuing to suggest that a consensus is absolutely necessary to our readings. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Paradise Lost has been testing ground for reading both with and against the grain of a text, and more often than not it seems to be the Romantic readings that I have presented which underlie interpretative decisions and commitments. A student of Milton would do well to consider why the major modern critics of Paradise Lost tend also to be literary theorists – C.S. Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Empson, Fish, Brisman, Bloom, Belsey, Newlyn and the rest. The simple answer is that Paradise Lost repeatedly holds open questions about how and why we continue to read poetry thereby ensuring its centrality in discussions of literary meaning and merit. In this final chapter I will sketch out the ongoing readings made against the grain of Paradise Lost, as well as those made with it, in some of the most significant of Milton’s modern critics. It is the case I believe that an engagement with Romantic reading habits is everywhere manifest. In 1930 E.M.W. Tillyard explored the problematic relationship between Paradise Lost as a complete text and its reception history. He throws discussion almost immediately over to the traditional opposition of ostensible and covert meaning: Perhaps to those of earlier generations the meaning [of Paradise Lost] appeared too simple to need discussion: does not Milton himself tell us all we need to know about it in his opening lines? But such simple-mindedness can ill satisfy

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a generation which is sceptical of professed motives and which suspects the presence of others, either concealed or not yet realised in the author.

Tillyard noticeably rephrases some of the self-evident claims that surface in discussions of Romantic readings of Paradise Lost but makes them specific to his own period of suspicious hermeneutics. To restate his position, the ‘simple’ Christian narrative of the Fall is not complex enough to satisfy the sophisticated reader of poetry and so generates the kind of alternative reading paradigms that the Romantic poets adopted. This reading is fair enough in so far as it describes a motivational factor to which we have already seen Stanley Fish for one adhere. As so often in early twentieth-century commentary, Tillyard fills the lacuna of embryonic deconstruction with the character of Milton’s Satan: ‘I do not see how one can avoid admitting that Milton did partly ally himself with Satan, that unwittingly he was led away by the creature of his own imagination’. Yet there is more than a hint in Tillyard’s choice of expression that indicates he hits upon, we might say unwittingly, the real centre of Romantic reading paradigms. The phrase ‘creature of his own imagination’ is a happily ambiguous one in that it refers ostensibly to Milton’s Satan as a character but it is equally suggestive of Milton the poet. In a highly Romantic sense the imagination of the epic poet has become something uncontrollable, a ‘creature’ like Frankenstein’s monster, beyond his authorial direction. As has become normative in deconstructive criticism, Tillyard places the poet in intractable conflict with his own poem. F.R. Leavis supported this theoretical position arguing that Paradise Lost displays a ‘discrepancy between theory and feeling’, in other words that Milton’s commitment to the story of the Fall left a gap ‘between the effect of a given crucial matter as Milton presents it, and the view he instructs us to take of it’. What makes this a negative effect on the poem for Leavis is that it places Milton at the centre of the action giving a ‘personal quality’ that ‘obtrudes itself’ in Paradise Lost: ‘He remains in the poem too much John Milton, declaiming, insisting, arguing, suffering, and protesting’. Quite unlike Coleridge and Wordsworth, Leavis censures Milton’s apparent egotism, his habit of appearing within the story in an executive or responsive capacity, because it demonstrates a narcissistic streak. Leavis does not mention the supposed heroism of Satan because he saw in the obtrusive quality of the poet’s opinions what he supposed to be a more pervasive problem with the aesthetics of Paradise Lost – a poet in thrall to his own powers. Leavis and Tillyard maintain quite contrary views of the literary merit of Paradise Lost, but both are alike dealing with the Romantic legacy of the poem. What emerges from these readings is that there is a fundamental factor in Romantic  10    10    10    10  

E.M.W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1930), p. 15. Tillyard, Milton, p. 277. F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), p. 24. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 25.

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misreading which may be repeatedly betrayed by Milton’s Satan, but will not be fully understood in a study of this character alone. The point is revealed by looking at the work of one of the twentieth century’s most vocal supporters of Milton’s Satan, A.J.A. Waldock. In Paradise Lost and its Critics (1947), Waldock echoes Leavis and Tillyard in finding a discrepancy at the heart of Milton’s aims. Like others, Waldock labels the discrepancy ‘Satan’: ‘The balance is disturbed; the poem, instead of being on an even keel, has a pronounced list, and Satan is the cause of it’. But is Satan really the ‘cause of it’, even here in Waldock’s proclamation? It is an issue worth pausing over because we are in the territory of turning Paradise Lost upside down again. The first thing to record is that Waldock is noticeably much more forthright than his contemporaries, Tillyard and Leavis, in asserting the attraction of Satan, and we find that the artistic appraisal of Milton brings with it the usual moral undertow. Waldock argues that Milton had set the poetic bar high in the first two books of Paradise Lost and believed that this opened the poem to difficulties from the word go, ‘the danger, of course, was that [Satan’s] impressiveness could so easily get out of control’. In a similar vein he argues that the episode of God’s election of Christ is misjudged by Milton because he ‘succeeded in suggesting a rather greater degree of provocation for [Satan’s rebellion], and therefore of reasonableness for it, than he ever intended’. But secondly Waldock alerts us again to the fact that the moral issues in reading Paradise Lost are inseparable from the formal or generic. Waldock is happy to praise Milton’s verse even when it successfully depicts what he terms the ‘degradation’ of Satan, as in the episode of Satan’s metamorphosis to the serpent: ‘Milton of course does it superbly, and it is hardly necessary to add that in sheer verbal power and expressiveness the passage has scarcely its match in Paradise Lost’. But Waldock reads Paradise Lost not as a successful exercise in epic poetry but more as a defective exercise in the modern novel. It is from the premise of the novel that Waldock actually derives his argument for degradation for example: ‘The changes do not generate themselves from within: they are imposed from without. Satan, in short, does not degenerate: he is degraded’. What Waldock is reading for in Satan is what we could call verisimilitude of character or realism – in other words the convincing rendering of the mind at work where the essence of character is derived from psychology or consciousness. What Waldock forgets is that, as George Eliot reminds us in Adam Bede, ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds’.10 In the case of Milton’s Satan it is his decision to corrupt mankind and the will to turn that choice into action which constitute his evil nature. No amount of rhetorical bluster in  10  10  10  10  10

A.J.A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics (Gloucester, 1947), p. 123. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 74. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 74. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 92. Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 83. 10   George Eliot, Adam Bede (Ware, 1997), p. 270.

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Pandemonium, no amount of attempts to present his own character to either fallen angels or the reader, should convince us otherwise. Waldock’s argument is consequently undermined by its lack of open attention to the generic issues of epic poetry. He rides roughshod over the exegesis of epic, in a manner not unlike the Romantics, but inconsistencies abound as he addresses the reading of C.S. Lewis. Waldock accuses Lewis of engaging in a sentimental reading of Milton’s Satan, ‘He is reluctant to admit that we can condemn Satan for some things and at the same time find him extremely admirable for others’.11 Waldock has a case here because any reader will find that some of the qualities we admire in Satan are the very ones that are theologically condemnable and it is often difficult to sift them during reading. Nevertheless he goes too far by oversentimentalising Satan himself, defending the character against all charges of evil, as when Gabriel taunts Satan: And thou sly hypocrite, who wouldst seem Patron of liberty, who more than thou Once fawn’d, and cring’d, and servilly ador’d Heav’ns awful monarch? (PL, IV, 957)

Waldock bridles ‘Are we, then, on Gabriel’s undocumented assertion, to make an effort to accommodate the Satan we know to a Satan who once “fawn’d, and cring’d, and servilly ador’d”? … This seems beyond reasonable bounds, this is not keeping to the rules of the game at all’.12 I can follow this assertion to a certain extent: Gabriel describes Satan as other than we have seen him within the narrative, but this seems to be undermined by those earlier arguments against sentimentality; a character may be created of both good and bad elements. If we take into account that Satan is a figure who alters to suit his environment – is ‘chiefly what the occasion makes him’ as Balachandra Rajan notes13 – then these claims by Gabriel are not unimaginable. Clearly though, for Waldock, his belief may only be applied if the so-called ‘evil’ qualities of Satan are also those which, in another context, make the character heroic. If qualities that are not noble, such as those Gabriel mentions above, were introduced then it would be sensible to read sentimentally. I think it is significant that after charging sentimental readings on his adversary (Lewis), Waldock gives a list of Satan’s positive (and only positive) qualities: ‘fortitude in adversity, enormous endurance, a certain splendid recklessness, remarkable powers of rising to an occasion, extraordinary qualities of leadership (shown not least in his salutary taunts), and striking intelligence’.14

  Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 76.   Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 81. 13   Balachandra Rajan, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London, 1947), p. 99. 14   Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 77. 11

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Waldock exemplifies the pattern of misreading which attaches itself to Satan at its furthest extreme. But the cause of Waldock’s list is not Satan so much as the confusion of epic with the expectations of the novel. Waldock’s powerful response to Satan betrays the way in which he apportions literary merit. Elsewhere Waldock also attacks Milton’s representation of God, but here his argument has distinctly Romantic overtones, aimed as it is at Milton’s narrative design. Waldock holds up Dante’s Divina Commedia as a more appropriate model for poetic depictions of God: ‘Dante’s scheme had certain inherent advantages, not least of which was the obliqueness that is the very key and the principle of the visions’.15 Waldock complains that Milton’s God is, in contrast, too obvious and really rather embarrassing due to the direct nature of his portrayal. While Waldock is happy to split Satan into two characters, his method is actually more appropriate when considering the character of Milton’s God. In the case of God, there does actually appear to be a genuine discrepancy, not only in the way Milton treats the character but also in whom the character actually is. At one moment God is transcendent to the poem, as in the invocation to ‘holy light’ that I have looked at in detail. However, whilst being described as ‘unapproached’ at line four, he is found conversing with Christ quite openly, and without any explanation from the poet, beginning at line 80: ‘Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage/ Transports our adversary’ (PL, III, 80–81). When Waldock picks out the inconsistencies of Milton’s narrative, it is surprising that he does not isolate this one and instead focuses singularly on the fact that Milton’s God is often too openly and therefore unconvincingly drawn. C.A. Patrides has also noticed the dilemma and argued that Milton often ‘differentiated between the father and the son’, specifically for ‘dramatic purposes’.16 I would even go as far as to suggest that Milton differentiated between two Gods, one for dramatic and one for theological purposes. It could be argued that this is something of a flaw in the design of Paradise Lost, although the Bible sets a precedent with God for example being wholly beyond reach on Sinai, but a tangible angered presence only a few verses later. What troubles Waldock most about Milton’s use of God as a character within his text is not necessarily a theological point however. It is the case that the use of the poet as a channel for vision – something so integral to Romantic depictions of the transcendent as we have seen especially in Blake’s Milton and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound – is awkwardly rendered by Milton in comparison with Dante: ‘Just as the Divine rays are slanted from Beatrice to Dante, coming to him as by a second view, so Dante himself, the figure in the poem, refracts to us the sight whether of damnation or purgation or beatitude’.17 What is essentially a Romantic claim highlights the importance of the poet in the role of viewer or interpreter

  Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 112.   C. A. Patrides, ‘Milton on the Trinity: The Use of Antecedents’, in Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology, eds. Hunter, Patrides, Adamson (Salt Lake City, 1971), p. 13. 17   Waldock, Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 112. 15

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within the text and so shifts attention from the transcendent to the experiential. Dante presumably protects the reader from direct exposure to God, because we see the effects of God and beatitude upon the poet. Equally the Catholic Dante was more used to mediating presences such as the Virgin Mary and the saints. Milton as a Protestant desired unmediated vision but, in failing to experience it, includes vividly imagined angels within Paradise Lost (like Shelley’s Ione and Panthea) who were perhaps only a real presence within the terms of the narrative. To post-Romantic readers of Paradise Lost the relationship of Milton to his God is then as much a poetic as a religious issue. J.B. Broadbent, for example, has argued that ‘all objective discussions of God are absurd … the contact with reality is restricted to moments at which the listener may share a glimpse of the speaker’s God’.18 Broadbent adopts the Romantic emphasis on figuration rather than theology, metaphor rather than metaphysics, by arguing that there are no images for God when He is gazed upon directly. Hence Milton employs the image of the fountain of light that we have seen both Coleridge and Shelley borrow as a metaphor for poetic inspiration: Fountain of light, thyself invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitt’st Throned inaccessible, but when thou shad’st The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud Drawn about thee like a radiant shrine Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear, Yet dazzle heaven, that brightest seraphim Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes. (PL, III, 375–82)

There is some similarity between the Gods of Milton and Dante (although Dante’s is never seen or heard) but we must be aware that both Waldock and Broadbent are Romantic legatees and oppose much that Milton would have believed. To argue that all discussions of God are absurd would be to suggest that the issue can only be figuratively debated – we can only search for images for the transcendent and therefore only render the poet experiencing the transcendent as in the opening to Shelley’s Epipsychidion. But of course this is not the whole story. In making his assertion, Broadbent denies the fact that, as Aquinas argues, God may be known analogically, as a cause may be known from its effects. For Milton, God’s ‘light’ would have been presented in this way, although he would undoubtedly have been aware that light may, paradoxically, also impede our knowledge of God: ‘the King of kings, and Lord of lords’ dwells ‘in the light which no man can approach unto’ (Timothy, 6:15–16). This certainly lies behind Milton’s invocation to God’s ‘holy light’ at the opening of Paradise Lost Book three. For the Romantic poet and the Romantic reader, the relationship of man to God is an opportunity to   J.B. Broadbent, ‘Milton’s Heaven’, in Milton’s Epic Poetry, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 132, pp. 132–56. 18

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exercise metaphorical capacity, not to debate metaphysics. For Milton we should acknowledge an awareness that God may be known through his works and his goodness. That is not to say, directly but truly through similitude. If we only see the issue, as Broadbent does, as an aesthetic one, or if we are content to remain in ‘obliqueness’ as is Waldock, then we are selling Milton somewhat short. II The reading of A.J.A. Waldock demonstrates that those twentieth-century advocates of Milton’s Satan make their judgements on formal and imaginative as much as moral criteria, echoing the Romantic reading habits I have charted. Waldock and Tillyard, for example, lay down a pattern in Milton’s reception history in which Paradise Lost is viewed as spiralling out of Milton’s artistic control that points towards the readings of Empson and the Miltonic post-structuralists that I will shortly come on to discuss. Underlying Waldock’s reading is the belief that Milton had sacrificed ‘poetry’ to the formal demands of epic teleology. If we trace that underlying presumption back even further we will find that, whilst making largescale judgements based on the novel, Waldock privileges the kind of poetry usually thought to be characteristic of lyric and vision. His favouring of Dante over Milton suggest as much. It is difficult not to see the Romantics, perhaps most apparently Shelley, between the lines: A poem is the very image of a life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.19

I quoted this extract from A Defence of Poetry earlier, but it is worth returning to now as it perhaps offers the clearest advocacy of the Romantic lyrical project. Just as Wordsworth could not have wanted to depict sincerely the actual events that contributed to the growth of his mind, Shelley makes the distinction we have already encountered between an internal and an external narrative. The latter is for Shelley an arbitrary fabrication that occludes focus on the real experience of poetry, which ought to be the representation of the poet’s mind in process. Noticeably the Romantic lyric temperament as it is laid down here does not foreground the place of the poet within a wider moral scheme as Milton does with all his characters from Lady Alice to Satan. Instead the part replaces the whole as the poet’s mind – the mind of the creator this time considered with a small ‘c’ – becomes a surrogate for   Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London, 1977), p. 485. 19

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all other minds. The unchangeable element of human nature that Shelley notes is the working of the human mind, not the belief that there are actions that are always wrong, as Milton believed and recounted in Paradise Lost. Rather than present a relationship with an external Creator, as does Milton, the Romantics largely demonstrate the replacement of God with the poet as his own creator. So when Leavis argues for a ‘discrepancy between theory and feeling’ or Waldock demonstrates that Satan was ‘degraded’ they both take the expectations of lyricism as their measure of quality. Waldock believed that Milton prostituted his better poetic instincts to his story. The fact that Satan was degraded is therefore a symptom rather than a cause in the matter. The cause will only be found by noting the way that lyrical readings of Paradise Lost are continually privileged for the uncertainty they demonstrate in Milton as a writer – the kind of provisional state of mind without strongly held views that leads to post-structuralist emphasis on polysemy and ambiguity. C.S. Lewis saw the root cause more clearly than most and so in A Preface to Paradise Lost he set about establishing the form of Paradise Lost before trying to gauge its success as a literary work. Each step of his method is designed to protect the integrity of the epic grain of the poem. Unlike Waldock, Lewis could not countenance that Milton had not fully planned his argument prior to writing. Significantly the major threat he identified was that ‘the unfortunate reader has set out expecting “good lines” – little ebullient patches of delight – such as he is accustomed to find in lyrics’.20 Applying a lyric aesthetic to a narrative poem involves, in its simplest formulation, selecting the best bits of a poem. Lewis was defending Paradise Lost against the charges of Leavis and Eliot of a lack of ‘concrete realisation’ 21 in Milton’s verse and a ‘Miltonic music’, which ‘weakens our sense of relevance, just as it relaxes our grasp of sense’.22 The problem as Leavis accounted for it was exactly that which Waldock finds on a larger level and which Keats so enjoyed – Milton allowed the sonorous effects of lyric to lead him away from narrative. Milton became enthralled not by the creature of his imagination but by the creature that was his imagination. Lewis counters these arguments by contending that the full poetic effects of Paradise Lost can only be experienced by ‘the subordination of the line to the paragraph and the paragraph to the Book and even of the Book to the whole, of the grand sweeping effects that take a quarter of an hour to develop themselves’.23 Christopher Ricks did not go quite as far as Lewis but made a similar defence of Milton’s ‘Grand Style’. A good example is when Ricks remarks, ‘lines which one has long admired for their brilliant succinctness, lines like “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” which from one point of view have the free-standing   C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, Oxford and New York, 1942; repr. 1971), p. 1. 21   F.R. Leavis, Revaluation (London, 1936), p. 50. 22   Leavis, Revaluation, p. 52. 23   Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 2. 20

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strength of proverbs – even such lines take on a greater force when they come as the clinching of a surge of feeling’.24 It should be stated again that while readers do not necessarily impose lyrical readings, a narrative poem might express a lyric aesthetic without being a lyric. Yet Lewis was right to believe that the New Critical school were actively considering parts not wholes, just as the Romantic poets clearly did select which parts of Paradise Lost they wanted to focus on and read narrative selectively (one only has to look at Keats’s marginalia to Paradise Lost to verify this).25 What we appear to be dealing with here is the territory that I laid down in my introduction; the need for a phrase to describe the reading experience and the difference between readings imposed on Paradise Lost and those deriving from without. Marjorie Levinson used several phrases that are worth considering again: ‘agencies that enable understanding’, ‘generative principle’ and ‘the particular reading paradigm selected’. What C.S. Lewis was actively attempting to do in A Preface to Paradise Lost was to establish that the agencies that enable Romantic understandings of Paradise Lost were in conflict with the paradigms of Milton’s epic intention. His long-standing debate with Leavis and Eliot returns time and again to exactly this point as he notes, ‘It is not that [Leavis] and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism’.26 Lewis as a classicist was obviously troubled by the Romantic lyrical temperament favouring instead inherited values, an oral tradition and the importance of literary heritage. Leavis was opposed to this pursuing the Romantic line of the endless generation of creativity activated by new personal perceptions. Lewis foregrounds the importance of literary structures and forms, while Leavis is cheerleader for the clarity of the lyrical sentiment. It might, then, seem foolish to suggest that Romantic reading against the grain as I have described it would also be an issue for Leavis – the overtones of his reading are vehemently destructive. Yet I would suggest that Leavis and Lewis are not as diametrically opposed as we might expect. After all, both critics are, to some extent, repeating the actions of the Romantic poets, because they both set up a standard of literature that is not of their own time (for Lewis it was Medieval and for Leavis it was Romantic). More than this, though, Leavis also seems to be troubled by some of the manifestations of the Romantic tendency to reach out for an alternative paradigm, or at least disrupt the epic narrative, that I have been describing.   Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), p. 31.   In practical terms, the practice of including extracts from narrative poetry in collections alongside lyrics also saw the fragmentation of longer verse. In turn this helped direct eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading habits. The influence of Milton’s illustrators at this time – most notably Fuseli and John Martin – also promoted Paradise Lost as a series of prominent pictures. 26   Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 130. 24

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The issue that dominates what became known as the ‘Milton controversy’ is clarity. Both Lewis and Leavis desire clarity although they aim to arrive at it via entirely different means. The issue divided Lewis and Leavis not only in regards to Milton but also in regards to the Romantic poets, particularly Shelley. Perhaps surprisingly it is Lewis who comes down most strongly in support of Shelley’s verse, comparing him favourably to Dryden. Lewis saw Dryden as a problematic writer, because he exhibited a lack of formal unity and harmony of mode whether it be in tragedy or satire, ‘He destroys, and is content to destroy, the kind of poem he sat down to write, if only he can win in return one guffaw from the youngest and most graceless of his audience’.27 Lewis criticises Dryden for the reasons that Buckingham turned him into Bayes – pandering to the masses and allowing his form and temperament to be dictated to by an audience of readers against the grain: ‘When he confines himself to satire, he is at home; but even here the fatal lack of architectonic power seldom allows him to make a satisfactory poem’.28 Lewis turns Dryden’s methods into a form of writing against the grain – the poet begins the process of reading against the grain before the words have even left the pen. Shelley, in contrast, appealed to Lewis for the clarity of his ideas, particularly for his employment of ‘architectonic’ power. For Lewis, Shelley had a cumulative and ordered system of ideas, deriving in part from Godwin but also from Plato and Dante: ‘To a Christian, conviction of sin is a good thing because it is a necessary preliminary to repentance; to Shelley it is an extremely dangerous thing. It begets self-contempt, and self-contempt begets misanthropy and cruelty’.29 While Lewis does not subscribe to Shelley’s neo-Platonisms, he nevertheless applauds Shelley’s thought as ‘coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience’.30 For Lewis, Shelley is unlike Dryden because he exhibits an even temperament, writing poetry ‘in each case proper to the species and theme of composition’,31 never deviating in form or blending elements of antagonistic genres. When a poet attains this clarity of vision, any muddle in the localised details of the poem – the kind Ann Wordsworth described as heightened word-consciousness – is less important to Lewis, ‘The faults are faults in execution, such as over-elaboration, occasional verbosity, and the like: mere stains on the surface’.32 Of significance to my argument is the fact that Lewis separates the clarity of philosophical designs from that of ‘surface’ realisation or the words on the page.

27   C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and other Essays (London, New York, Toronto, 1939), p. 12. 28   Lewis, Rehabilitations, p. 14. 29   Lewis, Rehabilitations, p. 19. 30   Frederick A. Pottle, ‘The Case of Shelley’, in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York, 1960), p. 293, pp. 289–306. 31   Lewis, Rehabilitations, p. 14. 32   Lewis, Rehabilitations, pp. 21–2.

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Keats, praised elsewhere ‘for a firm grasp of the concrete as it exists in space’,33 found it difficult to complete the Hyperion poems and so comes off badly with Lewis. Douglas Bush argued that ‘[Keats] did not start with a full fledged set of convictions, that both poems and letters are a product and a record of some years of development’. His argument is not far removed from Lewis’s own: ‘When my plan is made my poem is done’.34 But while Keats could never appeal to Lewis, Leavis found in him the expression of the concrete realisation he also valued in Donne and felt was absent from the work of Milton and Shelley. Leavis argues that Shelley has a ‘weak grasp upon the actual’35 and attacks the celebrated Ode to the West Wind because of its ‘poetic surge’ in which ‘we allow our selves to be swept along’.36 Leavis argues that ‘the image doesn’t challenge any inconvenient degree of realisation, and the oddness is lost’.37 Leavis also resists Lewis’s urge for progression, arguing that Shelley’s poetry induces ‘a kind of attention that doesn’t bring the critical intelligence into play: the imagery feels right, the associations work appropriately, if (as it takes conscious resistance not to do) one accepts the immediate feeling and doesn’t slow down to think’.38 Leavis criticises a type of emotional progression in Shelley, which weakens the reader’s grasp on the actual that we saw in Prometheus’ response to hearing the Phantasm of Jupiter: ‘I feel/ Faint, like one mingled in entwining love’ (I, 147–8). While Lewis, then, attempts to read consciously with authorial intent, Leavis resists both poet and poem. Yet, both critics are united in their search for textual clarity and coherence – Lewis pursues conceptual clarity that informs the structural unity of a poem, and Leavis pursues the clarity of localised lyrical expression. Frederick A. Pottle spells out the seriousness of such methods as Leavis’s on Shelley’s reputation: ‘So long as Shelley was widely recognized, both by those who liked his poetry and by those who did not, as one of the best artists of us all … attacks on the cogency of thought would not have succeeded in damping his fame’.39 Shelley finds himself in the same position as Milton in the face of Leavis and Eliot. In Milton’s case the situation is worsened as he is cast as the bad example that Shelley and others followed. Leavis instances the notorious analogy of Satan with the whale and argues that ‘Miltonic similes don’t focus one’s perception of the relevant, or sharpen definition in any way’ and that ‘We are happy about the introduction of so much extraneous matter because the ‘Miltonic music’ weakens our sense of relevance, just as it relaxes our grasp of sense’.40 T.S. Eliot makes a 33

  W. Jackson Bate, ‘Keats’s Style: Evolution Toward Qualities of Permanent Value’, in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Abrams, p. 345, pp. 340–53. 34   Lewis takes the phrase from Racine in Rehabilitations, p. 22. 35   Leavis, Revaluation, p. 206. 36   Leavis , Revaluation, p. 205. 37   Leavis, Revaluation, p. 205. 38   Leavis, Revaluation, p. 207. 39   Pottle, ‘The Case of Shelley’, p. 293. 40   Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 22.

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related point on the same simile, ‘We nearly forget Satan in attending to the story of the whale; Milton recalls us just in time’.41 What is apparent is that Leavis and Eliot find fault in the Romantic aspect of Milton the poet, first articulated by Coleridge, in which he is viewed as a writer obsessed with his own place in the poem. ‘Recall’ is a significant word, meaning in this instance that Milton returns us to the primary narrative. But does Milton actually recall the reader in time? For Eliot he clearly does, but would this be the case with a reader of a Romantic persuasion such as Waldock and Tillyard? Leavis would certainly not have thought so. Unsurprisingly, what is at the bottom of Leavis’ concerns with Shelley and Milton, despite his desire to pause and pursue close textual analysis, is that both poets’ ‘music’ and lack of clarity might prompt the disregard of, or reaching beyond, the rationally regulated text that Lewis is so concerned to present. The two types of clarity, whether on a grand, for Lewis, or local scale, for Leavis, are both threatened by the Romantic lyrical reading temperament that disrupts causality, prompts a search beyond narrative, foregrounds the experiential encounter of poet and reader and values multiple interpretations. For Lewis the Romantics suggest competitive elements to Milton’s authorial voice, while for Leavis this results in a weakening of the intellectual grasp on sequential reasoning that Blake advocated most strongly whereby the reader is required to follow metaphor as an emotional, and not logical, experience. Significantly, Leavis berates Shelley’s comments on poetic form and its relation to ‘Inspiration’ in A Defence of Poetry. Shelley writes, ‘The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions, by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself’.42 These lines are very similar in intention to those earlier quoted in which the poet privileges poetry over stories. Here I would suggest that Shelley goes even further to include all poetic forms in his philosophy. Shelley desires the purity of inspiration uncircumscribed by form and perhaps even by language. Leavis responds to this by adding, ‘Shelley, at his best and worst, offers the emotion in itself, unattached, in the void’.43 He might have added that Shelley also points the reader away from the logic of his text to the moment of inspiration that preceded composition – in other words, to an area exterior to his poem. The point is as serious for Leavis as we have seen for Lewis, because Shelley’s haranguing of ‘artificial’ connections between moments of inspiration is as much a threat to the progression of simile and metaphor as it is to narrative. On a local and lyrical level, simile functions in much the same way as a story; one element must grow from another in proper succession, and as Leavis writes of Ode to the West Wind, there exists ‘a general   T.S. Eliot, Milton (1947), in James Thorpe, ed., Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries (London, 1951; repr. 1965), p. 328. 42   SPP, p. 504. 43   Leavis, Revaluation, p. 214. 41

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tendency of the images to forget the status of the metaphor or simile that introduced them’.44 The point can be translated to the macrological scale of Lewis’ concerns with narrative progression and offered as a comparison. Both Lewis and Leavis share, on different levels, a concern with a Romantic tendency to read against the formal grain of poetry that denies logical cohesion and appeals primarily to the emotions; for Leavis, Shelley’s verse is ‘peculiarly emotional, and when we try to define this sense we find ourselves invoking the absence of something’.45 III The unavoidability of choice. Milton constructs his narrative in such a way as to make the avoidance of response, and therefore of choice and (possibly) selfbetrayal, impossible.46

The lines quoted above come at the heart of Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin (1967), although they could well read as an excellent description of the problem of reading against the grain. If any critic in the latter half of the twentieth century appears to make reading against the grain the centre of their own reading of Paradise Lost then it is Fish, but is he correct in his argument – is there little choice for a reader of Milton? For Fish, Milton appears to be closely aligned with his own God, at least as far as Milton’s God is perceived by his detractors such as Blake or Empson. In Fish’s reading there is certainly no room for the ‘Negatively capable’ Milton, which Lucy Newlyn believes is the real legacy of Romantic misreading of Paradise Lost. But, while there would be little point in claiming that readers do not ‘respond’, and often powerfully, to Paradise Lost, it does not necessarily follow that this leads to Fish’s unavoidability of choice – if Romantic readings of the text tell us anything then it is this. Reading against the grain still persists to this day, in one of its many guises, and perhaps remains the fundamental stumbling-block and dividing-line for post-Romantic critics of Paradise Lost. In my introduction I dealt with Fish’s recent work on Milton, but when he wrote the lines quoted above, they were addressed quite specifically to Milton’s apparent habit of correcting the reader, initially in the case of Satan, a point to which Waldock had earlier objected. Unlike Waldock, however, Fish does not consider the corrective narrator of Paradise Lost to be anything other than a part of Milton’s integrated teleology for the poem. Fish explains the disquieting presence of the narrator through making the reader the centre of interest or subject, and to some extent hero, of the poem. In Fish’s interpretation, each reader is led through a process equivalent to being stripped of Satanic pride: ‘that self-hood might be 44

    46   45

Leavis, Revaluation, p. 206 Leavis, Revaluation, p. 207. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (London and New York, 1967), p. 90.

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totally annihilated, that he might live, yet not he, but that Christ might live in him (Gal. ii, 20)’.47 The reader is charmed by the rhetoric of Satan in Pandemonium, before being led to realise that a weakness for rhetoric is one of the conditions of fallen man. At all times, for Fish, Milton is in total control: the complexities … will be apparent only when the reader has been led to them by the necessity of accounting for the distance between his initial response and the obiter dictum of the epic voice. When he is so led, the reader is made aware that Milton is correcting not a mistake of composition, but the weakness all men evince in the face of eloquence. The error is his, not Milton’s.48

Fish’s plan is a curiously formal attempt to avert reading against the grain, and it suggests that Milton himself had already perceived the problems that his text would create. In this case, Milton checks the tendency to read against the grain, which is already present in the reader, suggesting that it is indeed a natural habit of the reading process to resist one reading in favour of another: to side with Satan or the narrator. Yet Surprised by Sin is a document which focuses less on the search for a subtext, a criticism often levelled at the Romantic poets, than on not reading far enough or paying sufficient attendance to the text and thus being content to rest with what appears to the reader in the foreground. Equally, Fish’s thesis perhaps functions less well for Satan than it does for Adam and Eve. In considering the simile of Eve and Narcissus for example, Fish perceives that rather than function as a comparison between the two, the trope instead foregrounds their difference: I thither went With unexperienc’t thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look into the clear Smooth lake, that to me seem’d another Sky. As I bent down to look, just opposite, A shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d Bending to look on me, I started back, It started back, but pleas’d I soon return’d, Pleas’d it returned as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire Had not a voice thus warn’d me. (PL, IV, 456–67)

The comparison between Eve and Narcissus is an example of Fish’s gap between the innocence of our first parents and the fallen mind of the reader – the gap which we saw Dryden dramatically close in The State of Innocence. It is also a moment 10 47

   

48

Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 91. Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 9.

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requiring that so-called unavoidable choice: whether we see the picture as one of innocent curiosity or as confirming a (perhaps natural) suspicion that Eve is not entirely innocent before the Fall – there is inherent in her the potential for corruption, which Satan exposes in the temptation to eat the apple. The simile is crucial in Fish’s own theory as it offers the alternative of resting easy with, what he calls, the ‘surface parallel’ or reading more attentively for Milton’s true meaning: ‘the reader, whose will is also free, may decide to disbelieve Eve, looking no further than the surface parallel, and thus begin to ease, conscious at some level of the error, into the opinion “that Adam and Eve must have already contracted … weaknesses before they can start on the course of conduct that leads to their fall”’.49 The last opinion is that of Waldock, which Fish disputes and with seemingly good reason. There is, after all, enough in the passage to suggest to the reader that Eve is less than narcissistic here, finding not self-love in her reflection but ‘sympathy and love’. The reader is confronted with various contexts – the curious moment in which Eve becomes the first person to encounter her reflection, the strangeness that this moment would entail for a character without sin and selfishness, the relation and thought that in a fallen sense this would be narcissism, and the, perhaps natural, suspicion that this must, at some level, indicate a predisposition in Eve to vanity and therefore fallen emotions. But, each of these flickering thoughts will not, and should not, be totally annihilated by the return of the narrator. It is possible to have a variety of reactions to the Narcissus scene, but without dismissing the narrator’s guiding suggestions. To consider the narrator’s return a rebuke, as Fish does takes away the ludic pleasure of experiencing a poem. I think readers can accept the epic parameters, for which the narrator is spokesman, as guidelines in the midst of other kinds of reaction, which we allow to have their effects upon us. Fish’s reader is constantly being tripped up and made to feel paranoid, and this is not my experience of the poem. To draw an analogy from Virgil: any reader may think that it is a shame that Aeneas leaves Dido, that Dido is unfairly treated, that the Gods behave badly, but to read on at all in the poem, one has to accept that it is right in some sense for Aeneas to leave her. Even Fish falls into the habit of replacing a part with a whole as the complicating thoughts introduced by the Narcissus myth should ultimately be considered in the context of Paradise Lost, and not the other way around. That this does not rely totally on being a careful reader or being bullied by Milton’s narrator should be self-evident. While it is useful to reconsider the different readings that emerge from close textual analysis, Fish’s version of reading against the grain will not be understood solely in relation to local examples of misreading. This is a matter that he also recognises: ‘As always, the pattern the details fall into is determined by the reader, who can either labour to bring the poetic moment into line with the larger perspective, or reverse the priorities by handing the poet’s moral structure to fit a conclusion drawn too hastily from a local context’.50 As I argued earlier, the significant and 49

   

50

Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 218. Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 225.

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most operative word in Fish’s vocabulary is ‘local’. Fish’s caution to the reader is not far removed from that given by C.S. Lewis. Fish enters the territory of Bloom in his insistence on aesthetic ‘priority’, but the ‘larger perspective’ appealed to as government can only be the text considered as an entire and completed narrative. The significance to reading against the grain should not be missed – Fish’s insistence on Eve’s free will and that of the reader is motivated, at least in part, by a defensive response against selective, and fundamentally lyrical, readings. Again I should stress that I do not wish to deny Milton’s experiments with genre. Barbara Lewalski argues that ‘He achieves high art from the tension between his immense imaginative energy and the discipline of form’.51 Equally, Paradise Lost should be viewed as a heterogenous grouping of generic elements, with Satan using martial rhetoric, ‘Petrarchan compliments’, and frequently withdrawing into dramatic soliloquy. 52 Lewalski has argued that the progress of Satan is a feature of Milton’s reworking epic conventions: ‘Milton prompts his readers to begin a poem-long exploration and redefinition of heroes and heroism’, but also that ‘Milton does not use these comparisons [to epic heroes] to condemn the various literary genres, nor yet to exalt Satan as hero, but to let readers discover how Satan has perverted the noblest qualities of literature’s greatest heroes, and so realize how susceptible those models of heroism are to perversion’.53 Lewalski’s focus may be generic, but she comes to conclusions similar to those of Fish: Milton’s formal experimentations allow the reader to compare and contrast the epic, especially its realization of a new spiritual heroism, with those of Homer and Virgil. Most importantly, she asserts that Milton’s daring collocation of literary modes and styles does not commandeer the narrative’s primary meaning. The matter under specific consideration is still the question of free will; even in Milton’s heaven the nexus of meaning is ‘the continuous and active choice of good rather than absence of evil’.54 Free will is essential not only to Milton’s presentation of man’s first disobedience but also to Fish’s assertion that the reader does indeed have a choice – the choice to read with or against the grain. Fish argues that the tendency to accept the comparison of Eve and Narcissus is just one manifestation of a type of reading habit that reverses not only the priorities of an epic poem but also, literally, the narrative, as we are required to read backwards, viewing all our contact with Adam and Eve prior to the Fall as governed by the fact of the Fall itself later in the story. Our own foreknowledge condemns us to fall into Milton’s trap, unless we are careful enough whilst reading. To suggest that Eve has already experienced postlapsarian emotions prior to the Fall, such as vanity, would deny the possibility of free will at the moment of Satan’s temptation, which is as crucial to Milton’s   Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Genre’, in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford, 2001), p. 3, pp. 3–21. 52   Lewalski, ‘Genre’, p. 14. 53   Lewalski, ‘Genre’, pp. 13 and 14. 54   Lewalski, ‘Genre’, p. 15. 51

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point as it is to that of Fish.55 What Fish is doing, in essence, is suggesting that such a misreading involves the reader selecting one moment of the text, in this case the Fall, as judge and jury for all other parts of the story: ‘the uniqueness of the Fall as an action unrelated to its antecedents is obscured, and the focus of temptation is transferred from the will to the temporal process’.56 When one part of a narrative stands for all other parts, then a misreading will almost certainly ensue, that is still supposing that the reader’s ultimate goal is to be faithful to Milton’s own meaning. For Fish, the matter is less formal than it is for myself, because the moral repercussions of misreading the fall would implicate God, which would distort the poem’s meaning. Following the logic of allowing a part of a text to stand for the whole would, in my argument, suggest that Adam and Eve had no free will at the moment of the Fall, which must implicate one of two agents – Milton’s Satan or Milton’s God. As Satan, despite his protestations to the contrary, was created by God, it follows that God himself foreknew the Fall and its repercussions, but also spitefully engendered a scenario in which the painful transgression would occur (it must be allowed however, that, theologically, foreknowledge is distinct from certainty).57 In simple terms, all blame for the Fall is shifted from Adam and Eve to Milton’s God. William Empson persuasively argues for just such a reading in Milton’s God (1961), and Fish’s argument reacts, in part, to Empson’s, at least as much as it does to Romantic readings. While Fish, then, reasserts the textual authority of the poet in the wake of Waldock’s assertions to the contrary, William Empson does much the same, but with dramatically different conclusions. Much of Empson’s criticism finds fault with previous exponents of the ‘Satanic school’ but nevertheless takes sides with Satan over God. While Waldock was prepared to suggest that Milton’s Satan was practically two characters – majestic with his peers and humiliated whilst alone – Empson argues that the character maintains a unity, and in doing so finds himself, surprisingly, in agreement with C.S. Lewis: 55

  Partly the situation arises from a misunderstanding of the words ‘innocent’ and ‘perfection’ as H.V.S. Ogden has argued: ‘Milton repeatedly says that Adam and Eve are sinless, innocent, upright, and pure before the Fall. Dr Tillyard himself points out that Eve is called sinless as late as IX, 659 (‘To whom thus Eve yet sinless’), when she has already been led by Satan to the Tree. Clearly Milton does not mean by these terms that Adam and Eve are perfect. He does mean that although they are liable to temptation and although their wills may be attracted to what the temptation offers, they are innocent and upright, sinless and pure, until their conscious minds yield and they commit the act of disobedience’, H.V.S. Ogden, ‘The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered’, PQ, 36 (1957): 2, 1–19. 56   Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 231. 57   Dennis Danielson explains the difficulty in conceptualizing foreknowledge: ‘In order to get a conceptual grip on future events we must suppose them to be as it were past, but must also remember, accordingly, that their certainty is a merely supposed certainty unless and until the event actually occurs’, Milton’s Good God (Cambridge, 1982), p. 159.

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We first meet [Satan] certain of the righteousness of his cause though defeated, follow him into doubt and despair, switch back in the narrative of Raphael to find him confident that his cause will be victorious as well as just, then return to the story and find his character rapidly rotting away. As there is no slip-up anywhere in this involved programme, we can at least be sure that it was intended.58

What makes Empson’s critical views distinct from Waldock’s is that Empson does not see Satan taking on a life of his own, despite Milton’s best efforts to subdue him. Empson does subscribe to the degradation of Satan – ‘Most critics are now agreed that there is a gradual calculated degradation of Satan’59 – but argues that this was always a deliberate part of Milton’s strategy. Rather than depend, then, upon setting up an antagonism between Milton and his character (or his repressive with his better poetic self as Blake would maintain), Empson argues that an alteration actually occurs within the character of Satan. It is not then the poet’s attitude towards Satan which alters, but Satan himself. In some senses Empson’s argument, whilst maintaining Satan’s case, is, in its methods, largely unRomantic, as Satan is viewed as an apostate. Having made this point, however, Empson’s insistence on the circumstances which must be considered in altering Satan’s case follows Byron who, as we have seen, argues that ‘We are all creatures of circumstance’. This extract from Byron’s conversation with Lady Blessington also suggests that, in a perverse way, Byron would have approved of Fish’s reading even more than Empson’s, at least to create controversy, as Fish insists on the free will of Adam and Eve, but also that of Satan, and Byron is ‘always lenient to crimes that have brought thir [sic] own punishment’. Empson’s reading of Satan depends upon the belief that Satan is deceived at the beginning of the text but gradually realises that he cannot challenge the omnipotence of God. From Fish’s standpoint, Empson becomes another formal or generic reader against the grain, attributing all acts in the poem to the responsibility of God, and not individual characters: ‘Milton steadily drives home that the inmost counsel of God was the Fortunate Fall of man; however wicked Satan’s plan may be, it is God’s plan too’.60 Yet, as in the case of Leavis and Lewis, Fish and Empson are as much united by their concerns with formal misreading as they are divided by them. For Empson, the moment which takes precedence in the narrative is the degradation of Satan, and from his viewpoint all events are translated thus, ‘this bit of understanding [that Satan is degraded following the Fall, both by God and himself] gets obscured by a hunger to argue that he is very bad from the start’.61 The keynote in Empson’s reading is that ‘until Satan is in sight of Paradise he is convinced that God is not omnipotent’.62 The argument is a persuasive and radical   William Empson, Milton’s God (London, 1961), p. 71.   Empson, Milton’s God, p. 71. 60   Empson, Milton’s God, p. 39. 61   Empson, Milton’s God, p. 71. 62   Empson, Milton’s God, p. 37. 58

59

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one – Satan is actually convinced of his rightness whilst in Pandemonium. There is no period of self-delusion because Satan believes what he says, and it is only in the dramatic moment of Book four when ‘horror and doubt distract/ His troubled thoughts’ (PL, IV, 20) that he comes to realise the futility of his position. A few qualifications are needed to fully understand Empson’s reading. The first occurs in Satan’s opening speech. Although the character does not use the word ‘omnipotence’, it is clearly implied that the war in heaven has awakened a new realisation of the strength and reach of God’s arm: ‘so much the stronger proved/ He with his thunder: and till then who knew/ The force of those dire arms?’ (PL, I, 92–4). The indication of doubt prefaces the first of Satan’s brilliant rhetorical soliloquies, which climaxes in his defiance of God for exactly the reasons that Empson states: To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deify his power Who, from the terror of his arm, so late Doubted his empire. (PL, I, 111–14)

The vigour of the language and spirit of sentiment points to a conviction in his cause, but the actual process and sequence of the rhetoric is initially given its energy and purpose by Satan’s admission of doubt. The passage, read in its entirety, expresses Satan’s reaction to his hopelessness – indeed I would argue that it takes its mood of heroism from reaction to the fact that, despite declaring ‘All is not lost’ (PL, I, 106), the reader is made fully aware of Satan’s irretrievable loss. Empson’s grounds for believing Satan may genuinely think that God is not omnipotent point to an extra resonance in the text, but not to a possible sustained reading. The position is also undermined when Beelzebub, in reaction to Satan’s first speech, states quite plainly: ‘But what if our conqueror (whom I now/ Of force believe almighty, since no less/ Than such could have o’erpowered such force as ours)/ Have left us this our spirit and strength entire,/ Strongly to suffer and support our pains’ (PL, I, 143–7). Although the lines do not come from Satan’s mouth, they seem to indicate a general feeling of despair.63 Satan, immediately after crying ‘Tears, such as angels weep’, appears to undermine his own rallying words, ‘O myriads of immortal spirits, O powers/ Matchless, but with the Almighty’ (PL, I,) [italics added]. The question that Satan raises here also seems to have an immediate answer within the narrative, ‘but what power of mind,/ Foreseeing or presaging, from the depth/ Of knowledge past and present, could have feared,/ How such 63

  Empson comments that ‘Professor C. S. Lewis wrote a splendid chapter on the whole debate, challenging you to invent four speeches each more morally insane than the last, so he argued that Mammon is worse than Belial; but all this presumes that the rebels know they are in the wrong’, Milton’s God, p. 52. But if Beelzebub’s speech is anything to go by, then if they do not realise they are wrong, they do realise they cannot win, which is Empson’s primary point.

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united force of gods, how such/ As stood like these, could ever know repulse?’ (PL, I, 626–30) The answer to the question has to be Milton’s God – only Milton’s God could have that ‘power of mind’. Empson, just like his apparent opposite Fish, rejects the formal pattern of reading against the grain that we have witnessed in Romantic readings. The choice that Fish and Empson are actually both alert to is the misrepresentation of Paradise Lost through the neglect of Milton’s epic intention. The misalignment of lyrical partiality with narrative whole is the fundamental motivation for both critics’ readings. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom berates the ‘Angelic School of Milton Criticism’, commenting ‘Fortunately we have had Empson, with his apt rallying cry: “Back to Shelley!” Whereto I go’.64 Bloom supports the reading of Empson, in which Satan alters, but takes his cue even more openly from Shelley and Blake. In the first instance, Bloom makes a similar defence of Milton’s Satan, suggesting that critics have frequently misread the character by elevating his acknowledgement of defeat over his earlier incarnation: Satan’s later decline in the poem, as arranged by the Idiot Questioner in Milton, is that the hero retreats from this border into solipsism, and so is degraded; ceases, during his soliloquy on Mount Niphates, to be a poet and, by intoning the formula: “Evil be thou my good,” becomes a mere rebel, a childish inverter of conventional moral categories, another wearisome ancestor of student nonstudents, the perpetual New Left.65

Bloom reformulates the Romantic attack on ethical posturing, which descends primarily from Blake and Shelley, although is equally present in Wordsworth and Coleridge. These are the ethics which I have argued are consistently rejected by Romantic writers, often in relation to Paradise Lost. As with his Romantic forbears, Bloom necessarily advocates that more formal brand of misreading. This time the problem is related specifically to Shelley’s own phrase ‘pernicious casuistry’: Shelley’s point has been twisted by the C.S. Lewis or Angelic School of Milton Criticism, who proceed to weigh up the flaws and God’s wrongs, and find Satan wanting in the balance. This pernicious casuistry, Shelley would have agreed, would not be less pernicious if we were to find (as I do) Milton’s God wanting. It would still be casuistry, and as discourse upon poetry it would still be moralizing, which is to say, pernicious.66

Once again, the defence of Milton’s Satan entails reading Paradise Lost at the expense of its own generic priorities. To avoid casuistry, one must also no longer see Paradise Lost as a narrative or epic poem. As such, Bloom is a more 64

    66   65

Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 23. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 22. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 23.

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straightforward inheritor of Romantic reading against the grain than Empson. In fact, whilst Bloom defends the Empsonian rejection of Satan’s retrospective narrative degradation, he actually throws out the entire epic teleology along with Satan’s alteration into ‘mere rebel’. Bloom initially, then, follows Empson in attempting to correct the misalignment of lyric procedure with narrative, but continues by actively advocating the suspension of ‘moralizing’ and therefore the argument of Paradise Lost. Of course, no one would argue that idle moralising is anything other than pernicious, especially the unenlightened and reactionary moralising to which Shelley and Bloom attend. But the irony is that in order to avert reading in a primarily ethical way based on choice, rather than an imaginative way based on moment and negative inclusiveness, Bloom contrives another way of licensing such a reading. It might not emerge in quite the same way as it would through weighing Satan against Milton’s God or Shelley’s casuistry, but the process is nevertheless prey to setting one moment up with authority – such as Satan on Mount Niphates – over its true place within the logic of the story. For Bloom, however, the fragmentation of narrative is not an issue because his intention is, like Blake, openly to shift the interpretative signposts and present a new agency whereby understanding can be enabled. In so doing it is his purpose to return our critical practice to that advocated by Blake and Shelley. No longer is authorial intent, or even genre, an interpretative issue. For Bloom, the nexus of poetic meaning is entirely discovered in the relationship between poets: ‘Let us give up the failed enterprise of seeking to “understand” any single poem as an entity in itself. Let us pursue instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet’s deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general’.67 As a reading of Romantic poetry, The Anxiety of Influence hits the Romantic nail squarely on the head. Bloom asks questions of his readers that the Romantics also asked – why do we read poetry and what are the values of our reading experiences to be? He answers by dismissing the preoccupations of past readers and claiming a poetic significance for critical practice: All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology – in which the poem is and means itself – and reduction – in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem – a poem not itself.68

In Bloom’s reading the need for another poem (whether this is what we would generically call verse or a piece of prose criticism) to interpret poetry guarantees exactly what Blake, Shelley and the other Romantics fought for – the centrality of ongoing readings to the future of poetry. Bloom’s insight is acute in revealing that 67

   

68

Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 43. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 70.

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‘The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own’.69 As a description of Shelley’s and Blake’s poetic ideology this is certainly correct. But the issue here can be equally well described more in my terms of reading against the formal grain of Paradise Lost. Just as we saw Stanley Fish use the word ‘local’, so the operative word in Bloom’s theory of misreading is ‘moment’. Romantic allusion to Paradise Lost is, naturally enough, to a moment within the poem, which is abstracted and seen in the logic of an alternative context. In this sense, Romantic poets could be said to make Milton speak in their own voices. But, such a reading pays too little heed to the conflict of lyrical moment and narrative temporality, which it has been a major concern of this book to demonstrate. The Romantic triumph for Bloom is a formal reading against the grain, as it must cheat the end-point of the original epic context of Paradise Lost with a synchronic conjunction between poets made in the act of reading. This is the reason why Bloom, following Blake, suggests that ‘Individuals passed through States of being, and remained Individuals, but States were always in process, always shifting. And only States were culpable, Individuals never’.70 The model of Paradise Lost as an analogy for poetic influence works successfully for Bloom, but not for Milton himself. If we transfer Bloom’s extended metaphor here back to the text of Paradise Lost, we see misreading at work. Exonerating individuals of blame, logically extends to suggesting that Adam and Eve were blameless – as with Empson the fault lies with Milton’s God – which for Milton they were not. By blaming ‘states’, Bloom argues that the narrative context of Paradise Lost is itself at fault and no blame can ever be apportioned upon individuals. Taking up a position contrary to Bloom’s visionary aesthetics, if only as regards Milton, seems to demand circumventing his legacy of anxiety theory along with the history of post-structuralism. But issues such as interpretative accuracy and authorial intent, quaintly outdated for some, adhere strongly to Paradise Lost. Tillotama Rajan describes a Freudian hermeneutic similar to deconstruction whereby ‘the critic dismantles or takes apart the paraphrasable meaning of a text, in order to disclose within that text the gaps in logic which reveal the author’s subconscious awareness of or commitment to a system of assumptions opposite to the one he explicitly endorses’.71 The deconstructionist operates in a similar way, but by foregrounding polysemy and the instability of language rather than author psychology. Both positions suggest the post-structuralist sense of reading against the grain. Indeed, Rajan’s excellent summary of the hermeneutic of suspicion is not very far from Blake’s insistence that ‘Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it’. I believe that the insight Romantic criticism of Paradise Lost has given

  Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 141.   Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 30. 71   Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 16. 69 70

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me enables a vantage point on critical theory that has sprung from Derrida and Bloom, although ultimately it seems to me, deriving from Romantic criticism. Bloom’s conceptual charting of visionary Romantic misreading and Empson’s insistence on textual ambiguity provide the immediate context in which Romantic readings of Paradise Lost are still held today by writers such as Newlyn, Davies and Teskey. I have argued that Lucy Newlyn is the paradigm, and most intelligent observer, of Romantic reading against the grain in the twentieth century. In a recent reappraisal of the influence of Romantic readings of Milton, Peter Kitson writes that ‘Newlyn’s book brings back to us the ambiguous and contested nature of Milton’s presence in the period, as the heterodoxies and varieties of Romantic reading … respond to a Miltonic text that is also exciting, various and multifaceted’.72 I would not want to empty Paradise Lost of the imaginative excitement with which ambiguity infuses it. Yet I have made it clear that whilst I agree wholeheartedly with Newlyn’s reading of the Romantic suspension of ethical choice in favour of imaginative deferral – the ‘subtler third way’ – I feel much less comfortable in ascribing this to the text of Paradise Lost or to Milton. To my mind, this seems to subscribe too devotedly to Romantic reading habits. Whilst it seems almost inevitable, as Tillyard realised, that the strength of the Miltonic supertext invites the reader to search for a subtext, it is also necessary, as Rajan comments ‘to recognise that the text cannot simply be replaced by a subtext, and that the official content of a work does not cease to exist because it is undermined from within’.73 Rajan is primarily concerned with the logic of deconstructive criticism, but her qualification applies to Newlyn’s reading of Paradise Lost as well. Whilst Newlyn does not deconstruct Paradise Lost as such, or efface the presence of Milton’s ‘official content’, she nevertheless argues that for the Romantics, and also for Milton, the stated argument becomes just one of a variety of meanings, none of which emerge with authority. I would argue that, paradoxically, the plurality of subtexts that Paradise Lost appears to contain are given their meaning in relation to one dominant argument. I think most readers would agree that there is a difference between a poem like Paradise Lost and Coleridge’s Mariner’s Tale or Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and it is precisely this felt presence of one reading that does emerge with authority. Romantic writers undoubtedly suspend ethical judgment and also verifiable meaning in reading Paradise Lost, but this does not mean liminal fragments should hold meaningful sway over the epic’s temporality. It does not mean that Paradise Lost foregrounds an ideological position in which indeterminacy is held to be the proper end of our reading practices. As recently as 2006, Gordon Teskey argued that Paradise Lost is a truly modern poem because Milton foregrounds ‘the process of creating poetry’ and ‘the underlying hum of its production’.74 He discovers exactly what the High Romantics   Peter J. Kitson, ‘Milton: The Romantics and After’, in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford, 2001), p. 480, pp. 463–80. 73   Kitson, ‘Milton: The Romantics and After’, p. 21. 74   Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 19. 72

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found by reading against the grain of Paradise Lost: ‘[an] emergent structure, something that feels, even as we read it, still in the process of being created, of excitedly breaking forth from the poet’s imagination’.75 With the poet stationed at the forefront of experience, Milton appears to be Romantically charged, but we should see this not as a failing (as Leavis would) or a success (as would Teskey) so much as a result of the choice of Milton’s expression. Teskey argues that Paradise Lost is a text which ‘places the interpreter in a position of authority previously held by the author’76 and that a delirious relationship with God causes Milton ‘to oscillate between two incompatible perspectives’77 – one being the authority of God as Creator, the other being the authority of the poet as creator of meaning. I do not believe that if we reject such a view it means closing Paradise Lost to variety, diversity and, to use Keats’s phrase again, ‘the Magnitude of contrast’. However, it is important to recognise that the formal priority of narrative or epic is decisive. The moments of imaginative immediacy and poetic responsiveness on which Romantic poets – and many recent critics – seize are no less impressive in knowing that Paradise Lost is not a lyric but a work of art of a different order. I would argue, with Rajan, for ‘a polysemy that does not disrupt the organic unity of the text’.78 It is, in some respects, a conventional position and is frequently applied to allegory, but it currently needs restating – ingrained in the form of Paradise Lost is the opportunity to read against the stated argument, to advertise textual polysemy or even to deconstruct, but this does not alter the fact that the poem has a stated and even, in some sense, paraphrasable meaning. Paradise Lost has a grain and, paradoxically, it is the knowledge on some level of this grain that licenses a reading against it. IV In conclusion, it is worth recalling the question that I have posed on several occasions during this discussion. It is one that remains a genuine problem, in a variety of guises, in the study of Paradise Lost right up to the present day – is reading against the grain an error on the reader’s part, or does it mean that Paradise Lost expresses a tendency to be misread, which would, then, surely be a function of intention? I have answered that the presence of a grain means the possibility of misreading. Paradise Lost is defined in terms of its status as an epic, a narrative and an argument – three words that I have taken the liberty to interchange throughout this book because I believe that they can be read as synonymous for my purposes. In the present study each has come to mean that Milton’s poem expresses the failure of human will in the Fall of man and that only the poem considered in its   Teskey, Delirious Milton, p. 19.   Teskey, Delirious Milton, p. 47. 77   Teskey, Delirious Milton, p. 5. 78   Rajan, Dark Interpreter, p. 16. 75

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entirety will make this fully intelligible to the reader. Nevertheless, objections continue to be raised in recent years that still demand my attention. In 2002, Anthony Welch picked up the debate about the temporal structure of Paradise Lost, arguing that the form of the narrative complicates our ability to call the epic a sequence: ‘Perhaps the most obvious point about the chronology of Paradise Lost is that the narrative plays out in composite fragments, revealing the past incrementally while events unfold in the present – a construction that actually blunts our awareness of the chronological sequence of events’.79 In Welch’s view, the narrative is itself fragmentary, and this is undoubtedly true, although in keeping with the epic tradition of beginning in medias res. The narrative does appear to be naturally sectioned by Milton – the breaks coming at the openings of Books three and seven, when Milton moves from Pandemonium to Heaven, and then from Heaven into ‘the visible diurnal sphere’ (PL, VII, 22) of earth. As such, the flow in time is suspended as Milton bridges the corresponding spatial lacuna. This in itself, however, would not be enough, I think, to promote a lyrical logic into narrative form. Christopher Kendrick makes a more overtly lyrical point in arguing that ‘The reader of epic feels no need to grasp for connections in space and time, but rather focuses his attention on the present of a narrative self-possessed in each of its moments’.80 Kendrick completely recomposes the formal process of epic (here distinguished from other narrative forms) through his theory of ‘Gesture’: ‘Gestures are gestures precisely by virtue of their stereotypical performed quality’.81 Gesture is, in Kendrick’s theory, the fundamental unit of epic, which functions as a selfcontained vignette: ‘gestures stand forth almost as small narratives in themselves, and thus abstract the mind’s attention from the larger narrative structure and sequence which is based on them’.82 In Kendrick’s reading, then, the part is greater than the whole, or more specifically, the part contains the logic of the greater narrative – just as Shelley’s mind is the image of all other minds – and is the basis on which the entire text is understood. Likewise, the main feature of Milton’s similes is ‘the comparative independence of the simile proper from its comparison or actual referent in the action of the poem’.83 The charge is similar to that of Leavis, although in a less pejorative sense. The logic no longer refers to the action of the rest of the poem; indeed, a distance is created by the reader’s interest in the lack of relation between vehicle and referent and the purpose of the narrative.84   Anthony Welch, ‘Reconsidering Chronology in Paradise Lost’, MS, 41 (2002): 13, 1–17. 80   Christopher Kendrick, Milton; a study in ideology and form (New York and London, 1986), p. 96. 81   Kendrick, Milton, p. 99. 82   Kendrick, Milton, p. 98. 83   Kendrick, Milton, p. 100. 84   Kendrick takes the notorious extended simile which begins ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks/ In Vallombrosa’ (PL, I, 302–3) as his example. By the time 79

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The readings of both Kendrick and Welch suggest that to view Paradise Lost, as I have at times, in a purely linear fashion is perhaps an oversimplified reading. Amy Boesky has recently suggested that Milton’s purpose is actually to awaken the reader’s perception of the limited efficacy of his narrative model, ‘even as the possibility that the poem can be understood sequentially is being established, the idea of sequence is tested and exposed as flawed’.85 Boesky draws on the opening of Paradise Lost and argues, as I have done myself, that the reader is primarily made aware of the presentness, almost lyrically so, of time in Pandemonium: ‘a temporal moment that defies sequence’.86 Welch also makes the point that time in Pandemonium is complicated because ‘Milton imagines time here as movement without change, duration without sequence. As the devils “roll” on the burning lake, they also roll backward and forward through time; tossed between remembered happiness and present torment’.87 The dominant mood is one of loss indicating the past, but experienced by Satan in the present as mental anguish and physical pain. Boesky focuses on the shift in tenses in the opening of the poem that make it difficult for the reader to establish a linear pattern of events. Both Boesky and Welch are, however, primarily concerned with what has been called ‘accommodation’ – the fact that Milton frequently finds need to put what is essentially eternal into the temporal structure of narrative. As Welch rightly points out, ‘At the very brink of the eternal, the acts of the father and Son take place with such swiftness that Raphael can barely capture them in language’.88 There can be little argument with this: ‘Immediate are the Acts of God, more swift/ Than time or motion’ (PL, VII.176–7). The problem is partly one of Milton’s own making, in that God is made an actual presence within the poem, a character. This is a practice to which we have seen Byron and Waldock object. Rather than see God as external and indeed immanent in all works as Byron does; Milton asks the reader to forget such a God and focus instead on his own God within the narrative. Boesky adapts the argument of Fish suggesting that ‘Narration is continually linked in Paradise Lost to the temptation of sequence and its impossibility’89 – the reader comes to understand, initially through a process of over-familiarity, that God, and Heaven and Pandemonium, cannot be described in terms of narrative, and that narrative is itself a construct falsely imposed by man upon actual time. Boesky borrows the distinction that Frank Kermode makes between chronos and kairos, between

the angels are related to ‘floating carcasses’, Kendrick writes with good reason: ‘the sudden appearance of the angels in the guise of “floating carcasses” dislocates them from the place they had held in the simile just before’. 85   Amy Boesky, ‘Paradise Lost and the Multiplicity of Time’, in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford, 2001), p. 381, pp. 380–392. 86   Boesky, ‘Paradise Lost and the Multiplicity of Time’, p. 381. 87   Welch, ‘Reconsidering Chronology’, p. 4. 88   Welch, ‘Reconsidering Chronology’, p. 6. 89   Boesky, ‘Paradise Lost and the Multiplicity of Time’, p. 383.

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empty time and time given narrative meaning through the ordering of successive events.90 While Boesky’s reading is a superb account of the way time functions in Paradise Lost, she would not subscribe to Romantic reading against the grain in which part of a story stands for a whole. For a start, she denies that there is anything we could call narrative time in Paradise Lost until after the Fall. However, it is one thing to argue that Milton is alert to the limitations of his narrative and another to suggest that sequence is undermined completely. As I have argued, this recently revived interest in the function of time in Paradise Lost suggests potential reasons for the persistence of reading against the grain. Welch and Boesky are not, however, readers of a Romantic disposition. The primary feature of Romantic misreading is, as I have proposed, the undermining of the teleological imperative of Milton’s argument. In the process, I may at times have simplified the way in which narrative time functions in Paradise Lost, but this simplification has been necessary to highlight the Romantic emphasis on the indeterminate moment and the interpretive function of the poet. Joseph Wittreich, in his introduction to The Romantics on Milton, suggests that ‘An edition of that criticism will not dispel the charge of “fragmentariness”, but it will take us a long way in the direction of correcting erroneous views and eradicating prejudices that have grown up around this criticism’.91 Wittreich’s words were partly the spur that prompted me to redress the area of Romantic misreading, and his collection of Romantic criticism was my first port of call when considering the project. The irony is, however, that while he uses the word in a different context to my own, I think the primary achievement of this study has actually been to confirm the charge of fragmentariness in Romantic readings of Paradise Lost.

  See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theories of Fiction (Oxford, 1966). 91   ROM, p. 3. 90

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Index

Abrams, M.H. 9, 30–31, 67, 148 Achinstein, Sharon 45–8, 52 Addison, Joseph 42–3, 54 Beer, John 104–6, 109–10, 115 Belsey, Catherine 3–5, 18, 30–31, 49, 62, 99, 181 Blake, William 87, 90, 92–3, 99, 104, 163, 173, 201–2 Book of Thel, The 62–4, 72, 132, 139 Everlasting Gospel, The 64 Gates of Paradise 66 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The 6, 55, 60, 66, 72–3, 76, 94 Milton 67–71, 73–81, 145, 185 There is no Natural Religion 65, 70 Bloom, Harold 3, 6, 17, 20, 23, 55, 59, 66 n., 74, 77, 79, 152–3, 196, 200–203 Brisman, Leslie 6, 91, 105, 113, 133, 159 Burke, Edmund 6, 33, 44, 45, 60, 64, 95, 98, 102–3, 133, 141 A Philosophical Enquiry 34–42, 68, 84, 149, 168, 177 Byron, George Gordon 2, 61, 142, 161, 164–6, 177–8, 198, 206 Cain 55, 122–3, 130 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 94, 112 n., 133 Corsair, The 133–4 Deformed Transformed, The 136 Don Juan 2, 123, 130 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 125 Hours of Idleness 125 Lara 130–32 Manfred 61, 133, 136–8, 164 Marino Faliero 134 ‘Satanic school’ 4, 127, 129, 131, 137, 197–8 Two Foscari, The 135 Vision of Judgment, The 122, 125–30

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2–3, 8, 10, 30–31, 35, 95, 119, 141, 152, 161–5, 165, 173, 192 Destiny of Nations, The 109 Kubla Khan 13, 113–15 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The 61, 97, 107–15, 162, 203 Table Talk 97 Corns, Thomas 1, 11–12 Curran, Stuart 140, 150, 156 Dante, Alighieri 69, 97, 185–7, 190 Davies, Stevie 4, 6–7, 16–20, 30–31, 49, 86, 181 Degrois, Denise 107–10, 112–15 De Luca, Vincent 60, 67–8, 70, 72–3, 78–9 De Man, Paul 84–5 Dennis, John 42–3, 46–7 De Quincey, Thomas 55–6 Dryden, John, 44–8, 51–4, 190 Absalom and Achitophel 44–5 Love Triumphant 118 State of Innocence, The 36, 46, 48, 51–3, 194 Eliot, T.S. 19, 163, 188–9, 191–2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 39, 101 Empson, William 193, 197–202 Esterhammer, Angela 59, 67, 75–6 Fish, Stanley 4–5, 7–9, 16, 19, 25, 53, 69, 79, 182, 193–8, 200, 202, 206 Frye, Northrop 71, 75, 100, Godwin, William 33, 64–5, 160, 174, 190, Hartley, David 86 Hazlitt, William, 4, 20, 168, Homer, 12, 19, 21, 23 n., 44, 196 Iliad 24–6, 28,

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Jeffrey, Francis 125, 135 Johnson, Samuel 33, 54–8 Kant, Immanuel 33–5, 42, 150 Keats, John 1–4, 6, 12, 120, 124, 191, 204 ‘burden of the Mystery’ 159, 161–2, 164, 167, 171, 175–7 Endymion 164, 167–8, 172–3, 175 Fall of Hyperion, The 2, 13, 166–7, 175–6 Hyperion 105, 173–8 marginalia to Paradise Lost 14–16, 163, 172, 175 ‘Negative Capability’ 1, 4, 36, 159, 166–71, 174, 193 Ode on Melancholy 39 Kitson, Peter 103, 109–10 Kroeber, Karl 51, 53, 114, 144 Lamb, Charles 30, 118 Lau, Beth 15, 163, 167, 171–2, 174, 178 Leavis, F.R. 19–20, 36, 54, 163, 182–3, 188–93, 198, 204–5 Levinson, Marjorie 13–14, 16–17, 189 Lewalski, Barbara 5, 21–2, 27, 196 Lewis, C.S. 44, 51, 54, 184, 188–93, 197–8, 200 Marvell, Andrew 46 McGann, Jerome 34, 40, 83, 105, 112 n., 113–15, 123, Milton, John Commonplace Book 22–3. Comus 5, 7–8, 10, 12, 22–3,117 Of Prelatical Episcopacy 118 Paradise Lost Eve/Narcissus 25, 52–3, 78, 194–5, 197 n. Eve’s dream 28–9, 88, 137 free will 17, 20, 52–3, 57, 61–2, 65, 70, 78, 80, 120, 123–4, 137–8, 196–8, 202 light imagery 10–11, 98–101, 106–7, 146, 151, 186 Milton’s Satan 11, 19–20, 26–7, 35–8, 42–5, 47, 51–4, 61–2, 64–7, 71, 86, 88–91, 102, 126–36, 138, 141, 147–50,

156, 165, 173, 176, 183, 193–4, 196–201 ‘the sublime’ 35–43, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 98, 102–3, 127–8, 141–2, 149, 152, 156, 168 Paradise Regained 5, 8, 12 Reason of Church Government, The 118 Samson Agonistes 9–10, 12, 90 Newlyn, Lucy Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader 1, 3–7, 14, 18, 20–21, 29–30, 40–41, 64, 77–8, 81, 91–2, 113, 178, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1–3, 6, 74 Ovid 21–3 Metamorphoses 98 Patterson, Annabel 48–50 Peacock, Thomas Love 3 Pope, Alexander 54 Rehder, Robert 86–7, 91–2, 94, 108 ‘Romantic Fragment Poem’ 2, 12–16, 40, 58, 69, 78, 106, 113, 144 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1, 14, 42, 54, 127, 177, 190–93, 200–202 Cenci, The 142–4 Defence of Poetry, A 141, 144, 187, 192 Epipsychidion 139, 141, 150, 153–4, 186 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 154 Mont Blanc 149–56 Ode to the West Wind 192 On the Devil and Devils 140 Prometheus Unbound 9, 126, 144–50, 185–6 Triumph of Life, The 2, 140–41 Sidney, Sir Philip 49–51 Southey, Robert 122–4, 126–30 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene, The 13, 19 Shepherd’s Calendar 117

Index Teskey, Gordon 33–5, 38, 41, 51, 122, 203–4 Tillyard, E.M.W. 181–3, 187, 192, 197 n., 203 Waldock, A.J.A. 19–20, 183–8, 192–3, 195, 197–8, 206 Wittreich, Joseph 6, 73–4, 79–80, 140, 207 Wordsworth, Dorothy 29

221

Wordsworth, William 29, 31, 39, 55–6, 100–105, 121–5, 129–30, 161–6, 171, 182, 187 Lyrical Ballads 94–5, 112, 162–3 Prelude, The 10, 15, 55, 83–94, 99, 103, 107–8, 112, 145, 203 Recluse, The 2, 93, 105 Vale of Esthwaite, The 92–3