The Epic as Pastoral: Milton, Marvell, and the Plurality of Genre

When Milton begins Paradise Regained by defining himself as “I who erewhile the happy garden sung,” ¹ he is echoing the lines—possibly discarded by Virgil, possibly even non-Virgilian—which prefaced Renaissance editions of The Aeneid:

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis

[I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, then, leaving the woodland, constrained the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandman, however grasping—a work welcome to farmers; but now of Mars’ bristling (arms and the man I sing)] ²

Virgil here is of course defining the shape of a canonical poetic career, moving from pastoral to georgic to epic, which his own works established. Later poets imitated both this progress of poetic ambition and these lines. Spenser’s version of this gesture is the most familiar:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,   As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,   Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,   For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,   And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds. ³

The remarkable thing about Milton’s use of these lines is that he retrospectively identifies Paradise Lost as a pastoral, a poem about “the happy garden”—as opposed to the true epic, Paradise Regained, which he is about to write. No one familiar with Milton’s aggressive approach to inherited literary traditions will be surprised by such metageneric discourse. Nevertheless, few of Milton’s critics have followed this cue; even Empson, in his enterprising pursuit of the pastoral mode’s transformations, apparently hesitated to regard all of Paradise Lost as a pastoral. Moreover, the allusive gesture raises other perplexities about how Milton regarded the shape of his own career. Once again, even critics who have noted the Virgilian signature (for example, Lawrence Lipking) ⁴ have declined to explore its implications for Milton’s self-understanding. Is there a Miltonic georgic, or does Paradise Lost occupy the place of both pastoral and georgic in preparation for Milton’s efforts to sing the better, but unspectacular “fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom” (PL 9.31–32) (unspectacular, because even Paradise Regained gives us only the private version of Christ’s abstinence from asserting His own will as separate from that of the Father). Perhaps it is the political writings which dominated the middle part of Milton’s life and career that should be regarded as his georgic: plowing the fields of the commonwealth and sowing the seeds of a new political order to come. That is a speculation for a different kind of essay, but the encroachment of a georgic strain on the pastoral, toughening and complicating the enterprise of the more innocent genre, is an indispensable topic for Milton’s poetic enterprise—or, indeed, as Anthony Low has shown in The Georgic Revolution, for the generic and political bearings of seventeenth-century poetry in general. ⁵

Low takes account of the opening lines of Paradise Regained, but directs his attention less toward Milton’s retrospective redefinition of Paradise Lost than toward the ways in which georgic elements reshape the conception of heroic action in Paradise Regained: “Like the Georgics, Paradise Regained does not describe a pastoral retreat from responsibility but instead dwells on small, recurrent actions, often trivial or inglorious in themselves, that nevertheless converge towards a turning-point in the world’s history.” He reaches the strong and suggestive conclusion that “Milton chose in effect to write his Aeneid first and then his Georgics, and thereby to reverse the usual priorities.” ⁶ Such a reconfiguration of generic hierarchies seems entirely within the scope of Milton’s engagement with tradition, but in exploring the generic status of Paradise Regained Low leaves in place the assumption that Paradise Lost is indeed “epic”—“his Aeneid”—despite Milton’s provocative hints to the contrary.

Low’s emphasis on the significance for Milton of “small, recurrent actions, often trivial or inglorious in themselves” is also helpful (though its immediate application invites comparison with Stanley...