The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity by Henry Weinfield (review)

In nine chapters (three of which are devoted to Milton and two to Wordsworth, with the remainder allotted to Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Stevens), Henry Weinfield argues for the existence of a particular trajectory within the blank-verse tradition: verse that, whatever its author’s relationship to Christianity may be, grapples with theological issues ranging from belief in God and in the afterlife to questions of free will and non-being. This trajectory is distinguished by two interlaced features: the first being that the poems, for the most part, convey freethinking, i.e., the “independence of thought; specifically, the free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unconstrained by deference to authority” (Oxford English Dictionary qtd. on 2); and the second, that this freethinking is in part enabled by the hallmarks of the blank-verse form. As Weinfield writes, “all of these poets, at least in their finest work, are spiritual wanderers and freethinkers; they are all grappling with the religious crisis, or crisis of modernity. . . . Blank verse gives them the license to wander and allows their freethinking tendencies to come to the fore” (3).

Weinfield describes this trajectory as “a tradition of blank-verse Romanticism . . . linked by a series of complex inter-textual relations anchored by a form” (3), with Milton as progenitor. Challenging well-known critical accounts that reconcile the Christian and romantic strains in Paradise Lost, Weinfield instead highlights the divisions, emphasizing “an incipient skepticism, emanating from Enlightenment tendencies, that Milton needs to express but, as a believing Christian, and given the ideological constraints of his time, can only express by first labeling it as diabolical” (27). In his view, “What is a weakness from the standpoint of theology or metaphysics is converted to a strength as far as poetry is concerned because it means that Milton is able to confront and give voice to his own questions without filtering them beforehand through the systematic channels of theological thought. In short, through the agency of the devils, Milton is able to adopt an open-ended, freethinking perspective on reality that he is not free to adopt in his theological writings” (27).

Herein lies the book’s overarching argument: the questioning of belief may be theologically problematic, but it is the stuff of great poetry. And these dualistic tensions between skepticism and belief, crumbling faith in immortality and anxiety over mortality, are played out by the romantic and modern poets who turn toward the immanent, ordinary world, finding—and at times refusing—other consolations. Among these are Wordsworth’s investing belief in “the [beauteous] forms of experience . . . accessible to us” (84) and “constructing a religious vision out of an essentially aesthetic attitude toward life” (90); Shelley’s finding in poetry the creation of “a being within our being” that redeems us from the prosaic nature of the world (qtd. on 134) and that represents our intrinsic longing “to transcend the limitations of human nature” (143); Keats’s internalizing “the Edenic vision and the ruined sanctuary” (186) and transmuting the role of the priest into that of the poet; and Tennyson’s performing “the psychic work of converting the human desire for immortality into an acceptance of mortality” (209). In general, Weinfield’s interest is thus in the poets’ transmuting theological belief into poetic power and variously questioning, reconciling us to, or embracing the “fatal law” of mortal existence (234). This trajectory culminates in Stevens, who in “Anatomy of Monotony” conveys “full acceptance of reality” (230), without “taking refuge in poetry or music as an alternative route to transcendence” (236).

The book gives nearly equal emphasis to intertextual links between poets and poems. The most persuasive of these arguments center upon elaborations of direct quotations or sets of shared narrative features, as in the “obstinate questionings” that Shelley’s Alastor borrows from Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” (138) or the correspondence between the Poet’s encounter with the veiled maid, also in Alastor...