Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence

11: From Politics to Faith in the Great Poems?

269 11  From Politics to Faith in the Great Poems? David Loewenstein 1. Against Schematic Formulations How helpful are the schematic formulations and patterns critics employ to characterize the shape or trajectory of the late Milton’s responses to the political sphere in his great poems published during the Restoration? Is it at all helpful or even accurate to describe the visionary poet as withdrawing from politics into faith in the late poems, as though we can discern a consistent pattern of development or change in his dissenting reactions to Restoration politics and religion? Can we conclude with any certainty, by looking at the 1671 volume of poems, that Milton the disappointed revolutionary preferred the position of a pacifist or quietist (as exempli- fied by Milton’s retiring Jesus) following his long career of political and polemical engagements during the English revolution? This essay questions the critical tendency to make the Milton of the late poems too consistent and predictable in his various dissenting responses to the religious politics of the Restoration milieu. 270 David Loewenstein In 1990 Blair Worden published a now well-known essay on the politics of Paradise Lost (“Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven”) in which he concludes that the great poems, beginning with Paradise Lost itself, not only signal Milton’s “return to his right hand [of poetry],” but essentially signal the poet’s Restoration withdrawal “from politics into faith,” so that by the time of Paradise Regain’d, “written at the prompting of a Quaker [Thomas Ellwood], the retreat from the political sphere is complete .” Thus, as Worden observes, by the end of the Interregnum we can see in Milton’s controversial writings that “political language is beginning to yield to religious language,” as if the two languages are finally disconnected in Milton’s great poems.1 I suspect that many readers today would disagree with Worden’s formulation about the late Milton’s retreating from politics into faith, finding it unsatisfactory because it seems to reject the idea of the politically engaged Milton after the disappointments of the Restoration or because it sets temporal politics against faith and apolitical quietism, universal spiritual values, and the “eternal verities” of Milton’s greatest poetry.2 Worden’s voice, it should be noted, is one more in a distinguished line of commentators who suggest that the great poet, embroiled for so many years in political and religious controversies, finally sought solace in a personal, quietistic faith. In 1673, Andrew Marvell, no doubt aiming to protect his friend in a calculated observation, said of Milton, “it was his misfortune, in a tumultuous time, to be toss’d on the wrong side, and he writ Flagrante bello certain dangerous Treatises,” so that “at His Majesties happy Return [he] did partake...of his regal Clemency and has ever since expiated himself in a retired silence.” Similarly in 1818 Samuel Coleridge observed that the later Milton, “finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion , or politics, or society, ...gave up his heart to the living spirit and the light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his transcendent ideal [that is, in Paradise Lost].”3 More recently, however, a wide range of historically informed criticism has given us a Milton who in the great poems is intensely From Politics to Faith in the Great Poems? 271 political and polemically active in his responses to Restoration culture, politics, and religion. The poet-polemicist’s “experience of defeat” in the Restoration was thus an occasion to make a weakness into a strength: Milton did not simply withdraw from the political sphere into faith and a posture of passive quietism—thereby striving to represent “eternal verities”—but was a profoundly political animal in his last poems; consequently, we have Milton the poet of dissent, of political resistance and activism, of republicanism, of radical religious politics, and so on.4 Needless to say, I sympathize with these various versions of the politically engaged late Milton, although I myself have strongly resisted the tendency to secularize Milton’s politics (as some of the critical work on Milton and seventeenth century republicanism has done)5 and have argued for a much more polemically engaged radical religious poet in the great poems. Such a Milton does indeed unsettle the more traditional picture of quiescent Restoration dissent.6 Yet in this essay...