Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence

1: Milton and the Visionary Mode: The Early Poems

3 1  Milton and the Visionary Mode The Early Poems John T. Shawcross Writing “Of the Original and right use of Poetry: with the manner of its Corruption by later Poets,” Thomas Jackson remarked upon authors who were any way disposed by nature to the Faculty, were inspired with lively and sublimate affections, apt to vent themselves in such Poetical Phrases and resemblances, as we cannot reach unto, unless we raise our invention by Art and imitation, and stir up Admiration by meditation and study. And because neither our senses are moved with any extraordinary effects of Gods Power, nor our minds bent to observe the ways of his Wisdom, so as we might be stricken with true Admiration of them, we have fewer good sacred Poems, then of any other kind.1 He thus epitomizes the false and the true vates, the literary “prophet” or “visionary” who, observing God’s wisdom, can predict what the future will bring. As is clear in Jackson’s thought, the term carries a religious connotation, the true vates being one who is moved with the power of God and who is struck by the ways of God’s wisdom no matter what humankind experiences. John Milton’s much quoted line from Paradise Lost: “And justifie the wayes of God to men” echoes here for us as evidence that Milton believed in his truly being inspired by God.2 The Holy Spirit of God and his wisdom dominate the proems to books 1, 3, 7, and 9 as Milton pursues his “great Argument.” He has assumed and has put on the mantle of vates, one who through (poetic visionaries), by the grace of God offers the means of regaining “the blissful Seat.” First he delineates the cause (or causes) of its being lost, which cause (or causes) must be repudiated, thwarted, reversed to enable human redemption. And the path to “justifie the wayes of God to men” is opened by asserting “Eternal Providence” (25) to humankind who would seem to have forgotten God’s power and wisdom. God’s Providence is the Son, whose Incarnation will lead to the means to salvation—the Christ, the “one greater Man,” who will “Restore us, and regain” that paradise for those faithful mortals who “Acknowledge [their] Redeemer ever blest” (PL 12.573). The prophecy that Milton elaborates within his “sacred Poem” is built on many “visions,” of the past, of the future, and of the sinister present that suffers from political blight and human degeneracy and especially religious apostasy. This underlying sense of foreseeing what lies ahead, particularly if the future stays its course, and its reflection in poetics have been analyzed as “the visionary mode,” which Michael Lieb has discussed as the “thunderous otherness” of Ezekiel’s visio Dei, a manifestation of the religious experience with its transformative power.3 The term, as Lieb points out, is one mode of artistic creation which Carl Jung analyzed as derived from the “hinterland of man’s mind,” the primordial dynamism, the propensity to change, the transformative experience that defines and redefines itself.4 Vatic texts are underlain by texts of an “originary event whose mysteries they seek to illuminate”; “The new text, the new reading, is in effect the source not only of a new awareness but of a reenvisioning of the originary event.”5 Lieb’s important and explicitly detailed study answers a call for the attention to visionary literature that Leland Ryken made some 4 John T. Shawcross years before: “Its two main subtypes in the Bible are prophecy and apocalypse. Visionary poetry is a notoriously elusive form, and a great deal more descriptive work remains to be done in the biblical texts (especially their characteristic imagery and rhetoric).... The more we learn about the poetic strategies of visionary poetry in the Bible, the better we will understand some of the most striking effects in Milton’s major poems.”6 Ryken’s earlier investigation of The Apocalyptic Vision in Paradise Lost set forth the various motifs of apocalypse and apocalyptic imagery, and demonstrated how these various elements of the visionary unify in the poem to achieve what Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. will later distinguish as “a line of vision.” Of the subtype prophecy Wittreich, remarking that “Prophecy is a way of seeing and a way of writing ; that is, it is system of aesthetics,” maintains that “Isolated from the...