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  • Milton in America
  • Paul Stevens

Milton is more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States.

R.W. Griswold

Despite all the newspaper articles and the somewhat desperate attempts to elevate Milton's status by pointing to his influence on popular novelists like C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, what the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth has made clear is that England's great epic poet is no longer the cultural presence he once was. This seems to be especially true in his native country. As Clare Tomalin recently conceded in a large double-page spread in Britain's high-profile newspaper, the Guardian, 'John Milton is a great name, but today he is not a popular poet.' Ironically, she confirms her point by offering a defence of the poet that many will find embarrassing for its lack of engagement and faint-heartedness. Her insights often seem commonplace and, most strikingly, she writes as though no one has thought about Milton since the early 1960s – specifically since 1963 when Christopher Ricks demonstrated just how superficial were the criticisms of F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot in his much admired book, Milton's Grand Style. Tomalin returns to Leavis and Eliot, rehearses their ancient complaints – that Milton's poetry is merely religious verse, overly Latinate, un-English, and loose in meaning – and once again proceeds to refute them, proving conclusively that his poetry is in fact 'vivid and direct,' notable for its 'straightforwardness,' and, even more telling, that Milton 'is particularly good at endings' (4–5). This is less than compelling. As her analysis proceeds, the creator of Paradise Lost's Satan, the devil's formidable advocate, the heroic figure she wants to foreground, increasingly recedes into irrelevance and banality. To turn from the narrow parameters of this particular attempt to popularize Milton to the extraordinary range, fertility, and sheer intellectual energy of academic as opposed to popular thinking about the poet over the last forty years is more than a little refreshing. Considering the opprobrium the term academic almost inevitably brings with it, the irony is significant.

At its best, academic criticism of Milton has never been as dull or moribund as the term academic suggests or as those who practise it routinely claim. Such claims are in fact an integral part of the rhetoric of Milton criticism. They comprise a pattern so familiar that it is difficult not to see it as a disciplinary topos, a standard rhetorical move in which [End Page 789] critics regularly represent themselves as outsiders, as writing from the periphery or taking an Abdiel-like stand against the leaden-footed consensus of conventional Miltonists. Over and again, we are told that Milton needs to be defended against his defenders or rescued from the orthodox, that he is being taught from a badly skewed perspective or that only critics on the margins truly understand his relation to the future, and so on.1 That authors feel compelled to represent themselves in this way may well be a sign of real crisis as, for instance, in the 1980s when Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson drew attention to the strange paucity of interest among Milton critics in 'theory,' that is, in the destabilizing but profoundly illuminating possibilities of post-structuralist, feminist, new historicist, or psychoanalytical perspectives (see especially xvi–xvii). Just as often, however, this outsider trope can be seen much more generally as a reflex action or conventionally arresting way of introducing a new issue. Yet even in this, so we want to emphasize, the trope is significant, for it serves as a measure of the discipline's restless energy, of its determination, driven by Milton himself and his passionate refusal to sew up 'the womb of teeming truth' (Complete Prose Works [CPW] 2: 224), to think through new problems and enter new domains.

The particular domain that we wish to enter, the domain that seems to us overdue for new analysis, especially as the United States enters its second century of world hegemony, is 'Milton in America.' It's hard to imagine a more dramatic way of indicating the relevance of Milton in the 400th anniversary of his own...

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