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Reviewed by:
  • Milton and the Victorians
  • Daniel Karlin (bio)
Milton and the Victorians, by Erik Gray; pp. ix + 183. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009, $39.95, £21.95.

The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (2005), Erik Gray’s first book, showed his brilliance as a close reader of poetry and his ability to master a thematic argument. That mastery was partly the result of Gray’s intelligent grasp of the argument’s limitations. “Indifference” was treated as a strand in literary culture, not a worldwide phenomenon. Milton and the Victorians, his second monograph, has a strong and persuasive argument but overreaches itself by trying to match the misguided ambition of its title.

According to Gray, Milton’s influence on Victorian writers—poets, primarily, but there are also discussions of novelists, biographers, and critics—is “dark with excessive bright” (the quotation from Paradise Lost [1667], Book III, line 380 supplies the title of the introductory chapter). If Milton seems less visible in the work of Matthew Arnold or Alfred Tennyson than in that of William Wordsworth or Percy Bysshe Shelley, this is [End Page 134] not because he has disappeared but because he has become omnipresent. His great works are conceived of as “classics,” to be inhabited rather than encountered. The Romantics’ direct engagement with Miltonic subjects or language gives way in the Victorian period to more oblique, more haunted responses.

The first two chapters map the main contours of the argument and attempt to persuade us of its general applicability; Gray then follows some of its windings in much more convincing chapters on specific authors and works. The chapter on Arnold is a superb blend of critical acumen and sympathy, and the parallel between Arnold and Milton’s Samson, who “both made it their life’s work to rid their land of Philistines” (74), is the wittiest example of an always engaging, free-handed style. Tennyson evokes Gray’s skill as a listener to verse, not merely a reader: Gray hears, for example, the ironic echo of Milton’s grand narrative forecast of gain through loss (“Restore us, and regain the blissful seat” [Paradise Lost 1.5]) in Tithonus’s mournful plea for oblivion (“Release me, and restore me to the ground” [“Tithonus” 72]). The chapter on George Eliot demonstrates the complexity and diffusiveness of Milton’s “presence” in Middlemarch (1871–72), and Gray’s treatment of other critical approaches here as elsewhere in the book is exemplary in its firmness and tact: he differs from feminist readings of the novel that are fixated on the analogy between Milton and Casaubon, but he is not seeking to cancel such readings, only to make room for his own.

The problem comes when Gray’s argument is asked to bear the general weight of its title. He is uneasy when dealing with major works that don’t fit the theory, notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Drama of Exile,” the lead item in her immensely successful Poems (1844). “A Drama of Exile” takes up where Paradise Lost leaves off and also responds to Paradise Regained (1671), ingeniously restaging the temptation in the wilderness as a renewed assault by Satan on Adam and Eve. Gray can’t avoid mentioning this work, but he whisks it away without quoting a single passage or even telling the plot; instead he cites Barrett Browning’s preface as a classic instance of “Bloomian anxiety” (39), taking her deference towards Milton straight, and implying that the poem exemplifies her all-too-obvious predicament. Yet the opening lines of “A Drama of Exile” instantly belie the preface: they are a bold, darkly comic travesty of Milton, in which Lucifer serenades his troops with Byronic insolence:

Rejoice in the clefts of Gehenna,   My exiled, my host! Earth has exiles as hopeless as when a   Heaven’s empire was lost.

The sheer cheek of rhyming “Gehenna/when a” pokes fun at Milton’s snort against the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” (Paradise Lost, “The Verse” [1668]). The light-hearted note is not sustained, and the poem as a whole is solemn and sombre; but it is not at all “anxious.” It is...

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