The Embarrassments of Paradise Lost

-------- 11 -------The Embarrassments of Paradise Lost CA. Patrides planned a series oflectures at the University of York in celebration ofthe tercentenary ofParadise Lost, and asked me to give one ofthem. Since we were in Oxford in 196768 , doe invitation fitted nicely into our schedule, and we very much enjoyed visiting York and meeting Patrides and his colleagues. (As a Fulbrightscholar thatyear, Ireceived a number ofodoer invitations to lecture, and gave Ms one several times — at Durham, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Leicester, as I remember it. It was also one of the two lectures I gave as the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley when I returned to the U.S.) It was published in 1968 along with the other York lectures in Approaches to "Paradise Lost." When I was asked to give a lecture in celebration of the tercentenary of the publication of Paradise Lost, I accepted immediately. A good many months after my acceptance, I began to realize that I had acted hastily. It was only six years ago that I completed the writing of a book about Paradise Lost which represented my reading of the poem over a period of ten years or so. What possibly could I have to say about the poem which I had not already said? I do not mean to imply that I thought I had solved all the problems of that great and complex poem; only that I had given, as nearly as I could, a general reading of it according to my lights and limitations, and it seemed absurd to repeat myself. Perhaps the wisest thing would have been for me to have sent sincere, if belated, regrets. Instead, I took the usual academic alternative, and began to read and to reread some of the books and essays about the poem which have been published recently. It was not difficult to come to a few conclusions. First of all, I The Embarrassments of Paradise Lost141 could hardly pretend that there was any special need for me to contribute to the tercentenary celebration. With the rash of books appearing in the past few years, the poem is as generally "celebrated" now as it ever has been in the past three hundred years. And with the recent volumes of essays collected by Arthur Barker and Louis Martz, the forthcoming volumes to be edited by CA. Patrides, Balachandra Rajan, and Alan Rudrum, and the special lectures at York and elsewhere , hardly any student of English literature will be unconscious of the tercentenary or able to complain justly that recent and lively criticism and scholarship concerning the poem are hard to come by. A number of these works, particularly such recent ones as Dennis Burden's The Logical Poem and Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, and earlier, Christopher Ricks's Milton's Grand Style (1963) and Helen Gardner's? Reading of "Paradise Lost" (1965), suggested also that the famous "Milton controversy" is now over — at least in the form in which it was waged in the 'thirties and 'forties, with the exciting attacks by Eliot, Leavis, and Waldock, and the vigorous defenses by CS. Lewis, Douglas Bush, and others. This surprised me. Although I had thought the controversy more or less moribund in America, I had assumed that it was still alive in England, particularly since both Bernard Bergonzi's "Criticism and the Milton Controversy" (published in Frank Kermode's The Living Milton) and John Peter's A Critique of "Paradise Lost" had made the same assumption as recently as 1960. Yet it now seems that the two latter works really did mark the end. In his book Peter echoed much of the earlier anti-Miltonic arguments, but he also found much to admire in the poem, and he ended by placing Milton, once again, firmly in the English literary pantheon as second only to Shakespeare. By distinguishingso carefully between the languages and the assumptions of the defenders and attackers of Milton and Paradise Lost, Bergonzi discouraged snipers on both sides: it seemed futile to keep up a simple crossfire which was guaranteed in advance to miss its targets. At any rate, within the last six years no one, so far as I know, has seriously questioned...