Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton's Poetry by Louis L. Martz (review)

Book Reviews Dennis Alan Mann, The Arts in a Democratic Society. Bowling Green Ohio: The Popular Press, 1977. 152 p. This book is comprised of six lectures delivered at the University of Cincinnati during the spring of 1976, as well as a prologue and epilogue by the editor. Included are texts by literary critic Leslie Fiedler; sociologist Herbert Gans; art scholar Alan Gowans; John Kouwenhoven, author of Made in America; The Arts In Modern American Civilization; Constance Perin, social anthropologist and city planner; and philosopher Willis Truitt. As might be expected, the material covered is diverse, ranging from SAT scores and Marxism to shopping centers and fast food eateries, yet fundamentally all of the texts address the same dilemma: The standards by which we differentiate between art and craft, between any art form and its popular counterpart, are ultimately elitist standards, and as such are at odds with the spirit of a democratic society. But by what standards then, if any, should art be judged? And what role should it play in a society such as ours? Much of the material here is thought-provoking, but too often it is difficult to get through. These texts were originally meant to be delivered aloud. Gowan's detailed comparison of architectural styles, for instance, must have played nicely as a slide presentation, but hunting photos, flipping back then forth, makes it tiresome in a book. Professor Kouwenhoven 's "Art, Disorder and American Experience," was delivered with wit and charm, I'm sure. On the page, however, it just seems coy. The central difficulty with Mann's collection of lectures is that they remain too much that; a collection of lectures. JAY M. BOYER, Arizona State University Louis L. Martz, Poet o/ Exile: A Study of Milton's Poetry. Yale. $20.00. Arnold Stein, a better critic than I, has called this book the best study in a half-century of the whole of Milton's poetry. If he is right, the enterprise of Milton scholarship is in a sorry state of affairs and ought to be abandoned. To be sure, interspersed amidst the study's 16 chapters and two appendices are to be found many insights spanning the entire Miltonic corpus: the masque "Comus" is said to be more a celebration of the civilizing power of poetry and music than an allegory of chastity; the opening lines of the pastoral elegy "Lycidas" are skillfully related to the Epistle to the Hebrews; the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in the biblical epic "Paradise Lost" is shown to be less an extirpation than a rescue; and the opening lines of "Paradise Regained," Milton's brief epic on the temptation of Christ in the desert, are said, speculatively and insightfully, to imply a parodie reversal of certain thematic priorities implicit in Virgilian pastoral and epic poetry. The question, however, is whether such insights as these are enough to salvage a book that is otherwise dull, dreary, repetitious, and outmoded. I think not. All or (large) part of 13 of its chapters have appeared previously in ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW283 Book Reviews various scholarly journals, in essay collections, and/or in his earlier book "The Paradise Within." In my opinion, what little has been done to rectify these materials falls short of the sort of transformation that might have justified their reissue in book form. Excepting the insights listed above there is little of interest here and much to disagree with, especially in relation to "Paradise Lost": Martz belabors weak analogies between it and contemporary poetry, notably the "Exil," of St.-John Perse; he resurrects the discredited heresy that Milton's Satan is permeated with the poet's sympathy; he lamely suggests that the Christian epic's treatment of Greek myth is not that censorious; he denies the existence of essential differences between the Unfällen and fallen states of Adam and Eve (would that he were right!); he erroneously accuses Unfällen Adam of serious strategic errors in the controversial separation scene wherein Eve goes off to her doom; etc. One could accept, even revel in, assertions such as these in a well-written book; but Martz's style is turgid...